Mr. Trine, "an officer on our police force who has
told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the
evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his
oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so
takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could
hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he
become by reason of this inflowing tide."[236]

[236] In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening
such mystical moods.[237] Most of the striking cases which I have
collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this
fact in many passages of great beauty--this extract, for example, from
Amiel's Journal Intime:--

[237] The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this
from Starbuck's manuscript collection:--

"I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at
the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the
immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an
atom too small for the notice of Almighty God."

I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck's collection:--

"In that time the consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes.
I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I might say,
yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I
speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in
myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was
controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds,
insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of
existence, of being a part of it all--the drizzling rain, the shadows
of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following,
such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew
so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme
power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not
constant." The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp. 65, 66, 69, are
still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality,
in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer
explains that the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of
immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these
rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitua