l spring of Joy from which
numberless sprays of laughter leap up throughout the world.

I had never before marked the play of limbs and lineaments which always
accompanies even the least of man's actions; now I was spell-bound by
their variety, which I came across on all sides, at every moment. Yet I
saw them not as being apart by themselves, but as parts of that
amazingly beautiful greater dance which goes on at this very moment
throughout the world of men, in each of their homes, in their
multifarious wants and activities.

Friend laughs with friend, the mother fondles her child, one cow sidles
up to another and licks its body, and the immeasurability behind these
comes direct to my mind with a shock which almost savours of pain.

When of this period I wrote:

I know not how of a sudden my heart flung open its doors,
And let the crowd of worlds rush in, greeting each other,--

it was no poetic exaggeration. Rather I had not the power to express all
I felt.

For some time together I remained in this self-forgetful state of bliss.
Then my brother thought of going to the Darjeeling hills. So much the
better, thought I. On the vast Himalayan tops I shall be able to see
more deeply into what has been revealed to me in Sudder Street; at any
rate I shall see how the Himalayas display themselves to my new gift of
vision.

But the victory was with that little house in Sudder Street. When, after
ascending the mountains, I looked around, I was at once aware I had lost
my new vision. My sin must have been in imagining that I could get still
more of truth from the outside. However sky-piercing the king of
mountains may be, he can have nothing in his gift for me; while He who
is the Giver can vouchsafe a vision of the eternal universe in the
dingiest of lanes, and in a moment of time.

I wandered about amongst the firs, I sat near the falls and bathed in
their waters, I gazed at the grandeur of Kinchinjunga through a
cloudless sky, but in what had seemed to me these likeliest of places,
I found _it_ not. I had come to know it, but could see it no longer.
While I was admiring the gem the lid had suddenly closed, leaving me
staring at the enclosing casket. But, for all the attractiveness of its
workmanship, there was no longer any danger of my mistaking it for
merely an empty box.

My _Morning Songs_ came to an end, their last echo dying out with _The
Echo_ which I wrote at Darjeeling. This apparently proved such a