the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast
animal life of her, the vast passional, the mental clutch and
hammer-blow. The spiritual Rome? He sought it--it must be there. At
last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....
Rome.

If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and
floating. He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to. Like
and like, and synthesis of syntheses! Images, finding that of which
they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line,
their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of
riddles never meant to be answered.... He had a great fund of images,
material so full that it must begin to build higher. Building higher
meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.

He lay still among the grasses, and it was as though he lay also amid
the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living. Now
and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always
momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and
space, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them. The lightning
went--but always left something transforming. And then for three years
all gleams stopped, a leaden wall that they could not pierce rearing
itself.

Latterly they had begun to return.... The proud will might rise
against them, but they came. Then it must be so, he would have said of
another, that the will was divided. Part of it must still have kept
its seat before the door whence the lights came, stayed there with its
face in its hands, waiting its season. And a part that had said no
must be coming to say yes, going and taking its place beside the other
by the door. And together they were strong enough to bring the
gleaming back, watching the propitious moment. But still there was the
opposed will, and it was strong.... When the light came it sought out
old traces of itself, and these became revivified. Then all joined
together to make a flood against the abundant darkness. A day like
this joined itself through likeness to others on the other side of the
three years, and also to moments of the months just passed and
passing. Union was made with a sleepless night in an inn of Spain,
with the hours after his encounter with Ian in the Paris theater, with
that time he sat upon the river steps and saw that the dead were
living and the prisoners free, with the hour in the amphitheater and
af