in my heart, and some one walked with me
therein. For Life in its simplest form--of breathing leaves and growing
flowers, of trees and plants and shrubs--glowed all about me in the
darkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strong
stems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon every
side, brimming with beauty and stillness did not seek to advertise. And
of this simplest form of life--the vegetable kingdom--I became vividly
aware, prodigal, mysterious, yet purposive. The outer garden merged with
the inner, and the Presence walked in both of them....

I was led backwards, far down into my own being. I reached the earliest,
simplest functions by which I myself had come to be, the state where the
frontier lies between that which is dead and that which is alive.
Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, that
frontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power of
converting the mineral or the chemical into the living organism by
absorption; and here, among the leaves and roots and flowers, that power
was sweetly, irresistibly, at work.

It seemed I reached that frontier, and I passed it. Beauty came through
the most primitive aspect of my being.

And so I would tell you, you alone of all the world, that the Presence
walking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that I
was aware of it in what seemed my earliest and most innocent state of
soul.

Beside me, in that old-world garden, walked the Cause of all things. The
Beauty that in you was truth, in Marion tenderness, was harvested: and
somebody was pleased.

XI

ALL this I have told to you because we have known together the closest
intimacy possible to human beings--we have shared beauty.

They said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you were
dead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favourite
southwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into
space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now
in my long letter. It is enough. I know.

There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other
realized at the time.... In the body there was promise. There is now
accomplishment.

It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the
heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You
will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all
out. I am not apparen