‘I wish I was quite sure about the Work of the World,’ said the stream; ’I wish I knew for certain for whom we work.  I feel almost sure that it is for the sea.  He is very great and beautiful.  I think that there can be no greater master than the sea.  I think that some day he may be so full of romance and mystery and sound of sheep bells and murmur of mist-hidden hills, which we streams shall have brought him, that there will be no more music or beauty left in the world, and all the world will end; and perhaps the streams shall gather at the last, we all together, to the sea.  Or perhaps the sea will give us at the last unto each one his own again, giving back all that he has garnered in the years—­the little petals of the apple-blossom and the mourned ones of the rhododendron, and our old visions of the trees and sky; so many memories have left the hills.  But who may say?  For who knows the tides of the sea?’

‘Be sure that it is all for Man,’ said the road.  ’For Man and the making of cities.’

Something had come near on utterly silent feet.

‘Peace, peace!’ it said.  ’You disturb the queenly night, who, having come into this valley, is a guest in my dark halls.  Let us have an end to this discussion.’

It was the spider who spoke.

’The Work of the World is the making of cities and palaces.  But it is not for Man.  What is Man?  He only prepares my cities for me, and mellows them.  All his works are ugly, his richest tapestries are coarse and clumsy.  He is a noisy idler.  He only protects me from mine enemy the wind; and the beautiful work in my cities, the curving outlines and the delicate weavings, is all mine.  Ten years to a hundred it takes to build a city, for five or six hundred more it mellows, and is prepared for me; then I inhabit it, and hide away all that is ugly, and draw beautiful lines about it to and fro.  There is nothing so beautiful as cities and palaces; they are the loveliest places in the world, because they are the stillest, and so most like the stars.  They are noisy at first, for a little, before I come to them; they have ugly corners not yet rounded off, and coarse tapestries, and then they become ready for me and my exquisite work, and are quite silent and beautiful.  And there I entertain the regal nights when they come there jewelled with stars, and all their train of silence, and regale them with costly dust.  Already nods, in a city that I wot of, a lonely sentinel whose lords are dead, who grows too old and sleepy to drive away the gathering silence that infests the streets; tomorrow I go to see if he be still at his post.  For me Babylon was built, and rocky Tyre; and still men build my cities!  All the Work of the World is the making of cities, and all of them I inherit.’

The Doom of La Traviata