m at the end of Capitals now.

One afternoon we talked about corn--from the fields where the passionate
mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we
found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the
nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
everything.

Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after
all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first
wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.

There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is
mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no
detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story--that
the plan is one.

17

THE IRISH CHAPTER

There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars--the
Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old
man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to
tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true
Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake
received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.

"It isn't--it's listening."

It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
called _Appassionata_. There is one here who plays that, and because it
tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the
others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems
to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never
tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a
woman--of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love--but
her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth.
The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her--her love a
perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not
be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her
re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.

The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's _Departure_--to us the most
magic of all the great little poems. But in _Departure_ it is the woman
who is called.

... Again and again in the _Appassionata_, the word comes to the woman,
saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will
not hear. We sense her splend