evening. There was no night
there. More than that. In the other life, the dark low-hung days, one
seemed to have lived so little, and always to have been making
arrangements to live; so much time spent in plans and schemes, in
alterations and regrets. There was this to be done and that to be
completed; one thing to be begun, another to be cleared away; always in
search of the peace which one never found; and if one did achieve it,
then it was surrounded, like some cast carrion, by a cloud of poisonous
thoughts, like buzzing blue-flies. Now at last one lived indeed; but
there grew up in the soul, very gradually and sweetly, the sense that
one was resting, growing accustomed to something, learning the ways of
the new place. I became more and more aware that I was not alone; it was
not that I met, or encountered, or was definitely conscious of any
thought that was not my own; but there were motions as of great winds in
the untroubled calm in which I lay, of vast deeps drawing past me. There
were hoverings and poisings of unseen creatures, which gave me neither
awe nor surprise, because they were not in the range of my thought as
yet; but it was enough to show me that I was not alone, that there was
life about me, purposes going forward, high activities.

The first time I experienced anything more definite was when suddenly I
became aware of a great crystalline globe that rose like a bubble out of
the sea. It was of an incredible vastness; but I was conscious that I
did not perceive it as I had perceived things upon the earth, but that
I apprehended it all together, within and without. It rose softly and
swiftly out of the expanse. The surface of it was all alive. It had
seas and continents, hills and valleys, woods and fields, like our own
earth. There were cities and houses thronged with living beings; it was
a world like our own, and yet there was hardly a form upon it that
resembled any earthly form, though all were articulate and definite,
ranging from growths which I knew to be vegetable, with a dumb and
sightless life of their own, up to beings of intelligence and purpose.
It was a world, in fact, on which a history like that of our own world
was working itself out; but the whole was of a crystalline texture, if
texture it can be called; there was no colour or solidity, nothing but
form and silence, and I realised that I saw, if not materially yet in
thought, and recognised then, that all the qualities of matter, the