nd then the new blessed
feeling that Winnie was not lying in a pauper grave had an effect
upon me that a few who read these pages will understand--only a few.
Perhaps, indeed, even those I am thinking of, those who, having lost
the one being they loved, feel that the earth has lost all its
beauty--perhaps even these may not be able to sympathise fully with
me in this matter, never having had an experience remotely comparable
with mine.

When I thought of Winifred lying at the bottom of some chasm in
Snowdon, my grief was very great, as these pages show. Yet it was not
intolerable; it did not threaten to unseat my reason, for even then,
when I knew so little of the magic of y Wyddfa, I felt how close was
the connection between my darling and the hills that knew her and
loved her. But during the time that her death, amidst surroundings
too appalling to contemplate, hung before my eyes in a dreadful
picture--during the time when it seemed certain that her death in a
garret, her burial in a pauper pit six coffins deep, was a hideous
truth and no fancy, all the beauty with which Nature seemed at one
time clothed was wiped away as by a sponge. The earth was nothing
more than a charnel-house, the skies above it were the roof of the
Palace of Nin-ki-gal. But now that Snowdon had spoken to me, the old
life which had formerly made the world so beautiful and so beloved
came back.

All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my
heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the
very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'

I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy
expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer,
Ferridoddin--

With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies--

that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the
Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of
the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of
my life, _The Veiled Queen_.

The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:

'The omnipotence of love--its power of knitting together the entire
universe--is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just
after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The
Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins
about girl children, and I trans