But the plague did not rest.  One saw a little black aeroplane hurry across them, a mere water beetle of a thing, and one wondered if a collision would send one of them to earth with broken wings.  But one did not really know whether this was the manoeuvre of an enemy or the daring of a friend.  There was never a more astonishing spectacle.  A desperate battle in the air would have been less of a surprise.  But that there should have been nobody to interfere with them! ...  Yes, it was certainly a curious sight, and London was justified in putting its head out of its house, like a tortoise under its shell, till the bombs began to fall.  Still, the more often they come the less curious we shall be about them.  A few years ago we gladly paid five shillings for the pleasure of seeing an aeroplane float round a big field.  There is a limit, however, to our curiosity even about German aeroplanes.  Speaking for myself, I may say my curiosity is satisfied.  I do not care if they never come again.

XVI

THE OLD INDIFFERENCE

It was an old belief of the poets and the common people that nature was sympathetic towards human beings at certain great crises.  Comets flared and the sun was darkened at the death of a great man.  Even the death of a friend was supposed to bow nature with despair; and Milton in Lycidas mourned the friend he had lost in what nowadays seems to us the pasteboard hyperbole: 

     The willows and the hazel copses green
     Shall now no more be seen
     Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

It may be contended that Milton was here speaking, not of nature, but of his vision of nature; and certainly one cannot help reading one’s own joys and sorrows into the face of the earth.  When the lover in Maud affirms: 

     A livelier emerald twinkled in the grass,

he states a fact.  He utters a truth of the eye and heart.  The wonder of the world resides in him who sees it.  The earth becomes a new place to a man who has fallen in love or who has just returned to it from the edge of the grave.  It is as though he saw the flowers as a stranger.  Larks ascending make the planet a ball of music for him.  He may well begin to lie about nature, for he has seen it for the first time.  Experience is not long in warning him, however, that it is he and not the world that has changed.  He meets a funeral in the midsummer of his happiness, and larks sing the same songs above the fields whether it is the lover or the mourner that goes by.  The continuity of nature is not broken either for our gladness or our grief.  Mr Hardy frequently introduces the mournful drip of rain into his picture of men and women unhappily mated.  But the rain is not at the beck and call of the unhappy.  The unhappy would still be unhappy though they were in a cherry orchard on the loveliest morning of the year.  The happy would still be happy though St