years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.

The well known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of
this sporadic type of mystical experience.

"I believe in you, my Soul ...
Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;... Only
the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay,
such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me
the peace and knowledge
that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know
that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men
ever born are also my brothers and the
women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love."[240]

[240] Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was
probably with him a chronic mystical perception: "There is," he
writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior
human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument,
frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal
and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the
absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this
multifariousness this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and
general unsettiedness, we call THE WORLD; a soul-sight of that divine
clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all
history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous,
like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and
root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface."
Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception.
Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.

I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it
from the Autobiography of J. Trevor.[241]

[241] My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.

"One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian
Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them--as
though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the
chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt
such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very
reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the
town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog.
In the loveliness