my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture
with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a
certain hill-top he says:--

"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the
grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of feeling
which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the
sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no
manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these
I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... The great sun,
burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the
pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled
me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he
would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward
show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going
on in me as I reclined there!"[I]

[I] _Op. cit._, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards
of commercial value. Yet in what other _kind_ of value can the
preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it
consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered
in some one, by what the hour contains?

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests
make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were
necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to
attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective
scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or
loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which
will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an
eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a
minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a
lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot
be a worldly success.

Walt W