s the forests are as
short-lived as the flowers; all visible forms are but momentary
expressions of the creative force. In the work of the greatest mind
all spoken and written thoughts are but partial and passing utterances
of a life of whose volume and movement they afford only
half-comprehended hints. After a Shakespeare has written thirty
immortal plays he must still feel that what was deepest in him is
unuttered. There is that below all expression of life which remains
forever unspoken and unspeakable; it is ours, but we cannot share it
with others; we drop our plummets into its depths in vain. It is
deeper than our thought, and it is only at rare moments, when we
surrender ourselves to ourselves, that the sense of what it contains
and means fills us with a sudden and overpowering consciousness of
immortality. Out of this deeper life all great thoughts rise into
consciousness, losing much by imprisonment in any form of speech, but
still bringing with them indubitable evidence of their more than royal
birth. From time to time, like the elder race of prophets, they enter
into our speech and renew the fading sense of the divinity of life, and
so, through individual souls, the deeper truths are retold from
generation to generation.

As one meditates in this evening hour, the darkness has gathered over
the world and folded it out of sight. The few faint stars have become
a shining host, and the immeasurable heavens have substituted for the
near and familiar beauty of the earth their own sublime and awful
commingling of unsearchable darkness and unquenchable light. So in
every human life the near and the familiar is overarched by infinity
and eternity.

Chapter XIX

The Turn of the Tide

For days past there have been intangible hints of change in earth and
air; the birds are silent, and the universal strident note of insect
life makes more musical to memory the melodies of the earlier season.
The sense of overflowing vitality which pervaded all things a few days
ago, when the tide was at the flood, has gone; the tide has turned, and
already one sees the receding movement of the ebb. Through all the
vanished months of flower and song, one's thought has travelled fast
upon the advancing march of summer, trying to keep pace with it as it
pushed its fragrant conquest northward; to-day there is a brief
interval of pause before the same thought, following the sunshine,
turns south again, and seeks the tropi