SETTING SAIL

I’m standing on the seashore. A ship appears and spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at last she fades away on the horizon and someone at my side quietly says, “She is gone.” Gone where? Gone from my vision, that is all. She is just as large as when I saw her last. The diminished size and the total loss of sight is in me, not in her. Just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone,” there are others who are watching her coming and other voices take up the joyful shout, “Here she comes!”
— Robert Browning