"Oh, it was all hard to understand, and all sad, although it was so beautiful. Nobody really knew anything. People lived; they went here and there about the earth and rode through forests; so much seemed to challenge or to promise, and so many sights to stir our longing: an evening star, a blue harebell, a lake half-covered in green reeds, the eyes of beasts and human eyes; and always it was as though something would happen, something never seen and yet sighed for, as though a veil would be pulled back off the world: till the feeling passed, and there had been nothing. The riddle was still unsolved, the hidden magic unrevealed, so that, in the end, people grew old, and looked comic."