By the tideless dolorous inland sea
In a land of sand and ruin and gold

are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of
gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the
mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on
hearing the lines quoted.

It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before
the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of
a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and
back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they
are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in
the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there. The dead are
buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the
lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods
stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons
have fled from them. The very seasons have fled; so that if you look
up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned
to winter yet, nothing remains to show you. It is like the eccentric
dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking
certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as
earthly. It is a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and miles and
miles of it. It is the biggest thing man has done. It looks as though
man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself
a sorry attempt at creation.

Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the
beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and
wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has