then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of
the entire being into light and knowledge.

The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes
unheralded--a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store
that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can
be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax
is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is
unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the
phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a
lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is
not in time. It is eternity.

I suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that you
do....

I remember how, many years ago--in that delightful period between
boyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about the
universe--we discovered this unearthly quality in three different
things: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower
come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we
agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is
spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to
Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.

So, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this day
one in particular of the three--a bird's song--always makes me think
of God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever both
surprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise--that
people do not hush their talk to kneel and listen.... And of the eyes
of little children--if there is any clearer revelation granted to us
of what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do not
know it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filled
with wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless,
accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird and
flower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist a
No.

The wildflower too: you recall once--it was above Igls when the
Tyrolean snows were melting--how we found a sudden gentian on the
dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked
all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single
blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that
star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the
whole passion of the e