chorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of
note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly, in its
depths, I heard a chirrup and the whir of startled wings.

"Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the
intricate delicacy before me and marvelling how richly God has
made his worlds...."

And not only the writer but also every other person on the earth had
been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw
beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they
had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men
preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an
asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson--I cannot
deny that the book is didactic--of the change wrought by the comet is
that man should find the full expression of his personality in
sympathy and understanding. The egotism remains, but it works to a
collective end....

War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable
corollary to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national
property; but the real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was
reserved for the following romance, published in 1908.

_The War in the Air_ definitely disclosed a change of method that was
adumbrated in its predecessor. The agent of experience is still
retained in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed
by the report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like
Hardy in _The Dynasts_, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a