led away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through
Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realize
Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me...." Ties
flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping
ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The
long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops
(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,
semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,
they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up
every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and
further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.
The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,
nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the
long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around
and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to
pick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I," I said as the
roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed
through the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of
glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my
feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through
deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and
hold me."

No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea
and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but
it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of
appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High
Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my
own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying
that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or
horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain
may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must
confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's
immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in
his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is
his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and
his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the
space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may