ty, they are linked
to the power that drives the universe towards perfection, the power
that knocks in a million un-advertised forms at every human heart:
and that is God.

With that beneficent power you cooperate. I ask no other test. I crave
no evidence that you selfishly remember me. In the body we did not
know so closely. To see into your physical eyes, and touch your hand,
and hear your voice--these were but intermediary methods, symbols, at
the best. For you I never saw nor touched nor heard. I felt you--in
my heart. The closest intimacy we knew was when together we shared
one moment of the same beauty; no other intimacy approaches the
reality of that; it is now strengthened to a degree unrealized
before. For me that is enough. I have that faith, that certainty,
that knowledge. Should you come to me otherwise I must disown you.
Should you stammer through another's earthly lips that you now enjoy
a mere idealized repetition of your physical limitations, I should
know my love, my memory, my hope degraded, nay, my very faith
destroyed.

To summon you in that way makes me shudder. It would be to limit your
larger uses, your wider mission, merely to numb a selfish grief born
of a faithless misunderstanding.

Come to me instead--or, rather, stay, since you have never left--be
with me still in the wonder of dawn and twilight, in the yearning
desire of inarticulate black night, in the wind, the sunshine, and
the rain. It is then that I am nearest to you and to your beneficent
activity, for the same elemental rhythm of Beauty includes us both.
The best and highest of you are there; I want no lesser assurance, no
broken personal revelation. Eternal beauty brings you with an
intimacy unknown, impossible, indeed, to partial disclosure. I should
abhor a halting masquerade, a stammering message less intelligible
even than our intercourse of the body.

Come, then! Be with me, your truth and Marion's tenderness linked
together with what is noblest in myself. Be with me in the simple
loveliness of an English garden where you and I, as boys together,
first heard that voice of wonder, and knew the Presence walking with
us among the growing leaves.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Garden of Survival, by Algernon Blackwood

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GARDEN OF SURVIVAL ***

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