"_There is only one
pair left; how fortunate you came to-day!_"

Always in this mode of the guiding are the little picture and the
_exact_ words: all of it of the easiest to describe; but of the other
and the greater guiding I do not know how to tell. It is sheer pure
knowledge, received not in parts, pictures, or words, but as a whole
and in a mode so exquisitely mysterious as to be at once too intricate
for description, and yet simplicity itself!

Sure, perfect, and serene mode of knowledge! Royal knowledge
which knows no toil, no sweat of work, no common drudgery, art
thou of the soul herself, or art thou altogether from outside the soul?
This I know, that though the first mode would seem to be very small
and to deal with littleness, and the last mode seems to be entirely
apart from it because of the greatnesses with which it deals that they
are linked and that the power is one power soaring to the highest,
condescending to the smallest.

So now, in the time of this strange abstraction and poverty, when the
cinematograph of my mind is closed down, and with it the delicate
mechanism which takes up, uses, and connects all that we take
in by the senses, and which makes the world so real and so
comprehensible, is become unhitched and disconnected, so that
nothing in the world seems any longer real or possesses either value
or meaning, and I stand before it all defenceless, seemingly unable
to deal with it, utterly indifferent to it; then and now Reason may
very well say to me, "You are in very great danger"; but I am not in
any danger, because I am guided whenever necessary by some
condescending sagacity far more sagacious than my poor Reason,
infinitely more penetrative and effectual than any sense of eye or ear.
I remain fully convinced that at this time, at any rate, it was an
outside sagacity which guided me--truly a guardian angel.

This period of intense abstraction, this strange valley of humiliation,
poverty, solitude, seemed a necessary prelude to the great, the
supreme, experience of my life. As I came slowly out of this poverty
and solitude, the joyousness of my spiritual experience increased:
the nights were no longer at all a time of sleep or repose, but of
rapturous living.

The sixth week came, and I commenced to fear the nights and this
tremendous living, because the happiness and the light and the
poignancy and the rapture of it were becoming more than I could
bear. I began to wonder secretly if G