being grows one with all-environing life;
personality glides into the stream of cosmic existence, lost and found a
thousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim divine feelings beyond
the power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is religion; it is a
feast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing ritual
without victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone,
man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high and
humble, transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of all
existences within the universe is made real and significant to the
initiate mind. For in the day fences are about us, roofs and towers
impend above our heads, we are cribbed in streets and markets, the din
of rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills our ears. Or if we withdraw into
some still chamber, yet the walls built by hired hands offend, and the
doorposts of sapless timber; no high influence can penetrate to us save
through the close court of memory, and compared with the breezy starlit
meadows, how poor an avenue to the soul is that!

And the exuberant sun of noon distracts, and the multitude of his beams
is troublous, for what does sight avail if the things of the heart's
desire are lost in immeasurable perplexities of light? For in the high
day the quivering bright air is more opaque than the dim spaces of
night, so tranquil and severe, or the glowing kingdoms of the morning.
At the springing of the day the eyes open upon awakening flowers, giving
filial heed to the marvellous earth which waits in patience for a human
greeting. I like the passage in which Chaucer tells how in May-time his
couch was spread in an arbour upon the margin of the grass, that he
might wake to see the daisies unfold their petals. Sleeping thus, he
also must have known those intervals of slumber when a sense of some
impending wonder grows too strong for sleep, and all nature seems
calling to high vision. Often I have been thus awakened, not by noise
or movement, but as it were by some strange prescience of beauty
constraining me to rise and look. Once I was drawn some distance round
the corner of a copse, and there, low in the sable-blue of the sky, in a
rivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung splendid
over against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet of
diamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or passage
of celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech,