The Gray Dawn can do no wrong. If those myriad voices suddenly had begun to sing a voluptuous evil song of the so great evil that I could not understand, but that I could feel instantly, still the Gray Dawn would have been fine and sweet and beautiful.
Always I admire Mary MacLane greatly—though sometimes in my admiration I feel a complete contempt for her. But in the Gray Dawn I love Mary MacLane tenderly and passionately.
I seem to take on a strange, calm indifference to everything in the world but just Mary MacLane and the Gray Dawn. We two are identified with each other and joined together in shadowy vagueness from the rest of the world.
As I walked over my sand and barrenness in the Gray Dawn a poem ran continuously through my mind. It expressed to me in my gray condition an ideal life and death and ending. Every desire of my life melted away in the Gray Dawn except one good wish that my own life and death might be short and obscure and complete like them. The poem was this beautiful one of Charles Kingsley’s:
“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands of Dee!’
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.
“The creeping tide came up along the sand,
And o’er and o’er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see;
The blinding mist came up and hid the land—
And never home came she.
“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair?—
A tress of golden hair,
Of drowned maiden’s hair,
Above the nets at sea.
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes on Dee.
“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel, crawling foam,
The cruel, hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea;
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.”