loss of personal
force, but for an hour the individual activity is blended with the
universal movement and the peace and quiet of infinity calm and restore
the soul. Meditation comes with eventide as naturally as action with
the morning; our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew
that we are one. In the noblest passage in Latin poetry Lucretius
invokes the universal spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the
creative force which impels the stars and summons the flowers to strew
themselves in the path of the sun. There is nothing so refreshing, so
reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the fountain whence all visible
life flows, as a renewed sense of oneness with the mighty appearance of
things in which we live. Now that all outlines are softened, all
distinctive features are lost. Nature loses its materialism, and
becomes to our thought the vast, silent, unbroken flow of force which
the later science has substituted for an earlier and cruder conception.
And this invisible stream leads us back, as our thoughts unconsciously
follow it, to One whose thought it is and whose mind shares with our
mind something of the unsearchable mystery of its purpose and nature.

Some one has said that a man is great rather by reason of his
unconscious thought than by reason of his deliberate and self-directed
thinking. Released from meditation on definite and special themes, the
thought of a great man instinctively returns to the mystery of life.
No poet creates a Hamlet unless he has brooded long and almost
unconsciously on the deeper things that make up the inner life; such a
figure, forever externalising the profounder and more obscure phases of
being, is born of secret and habitual contact with the deepest
experiences and the most fundamental problems. The mind of a
Shakespeare must often, forsaking the busy world of actuality, meditate
in the twilight which seems to release the soul of things seen, and,
veiling the actual, reveal the realities of existence.

Revery becomes of the highest importance when it substitutes for
definite thinking that deep and silent meditation in which alone the
soul comes to know itself and pierces the wonderful movement of things
about it to its source and principle. One of Amiel's magical phrases
is that in which he describes revery as the Sunday of the soul. Toil
over, care banished, the world forgotten, one communes with that which
is eternal. In the long course of centurie