of life, that is, play. This child was very diligently blowing
bubbles, occasionally turning aside up a by-path to make a
bubble-pudding in the soap-dish: the ruckling noise of this operation
possessing some magical fascination for all childhood. And in the
meanwhile, yellow dusk was gradually deepening in the quiet air.
Presently the tired sun sank like a weight, red-hot, burning his way
down through filmy layers of Indian ink. The day had been rainy, but
the clouds had all dissolved imperceptibly away into a broken chain of
veils of mist, which looked with the sun behind them like dropping
showers of liquid gold, or copper-coloured waterfalls: while
underneath or through them the lines of low blue hills showed now half
obscured, now clear and sharp in outline as if cut with scissors out
of paper and stuck upon the amber background of the sky. And then came
the miracle. Right across the horizon, a little higher than the sun, a
long thin bar of cloud suddenly changed colour, becoming rich dark
purple, and all along its jagged upper edge the light shot out in one
continuous sheet of bright glory to the zenith, while below there
poured from the bar a long cascade, a very Niagara of golden mist and
rain, as if the flood-gates of some celestial dam had suddenly given
way, and all the precious stuff were escaping in a cataract through
the rift, in one gigantic plunge, to be lost for ever in some
bottomless abyss.

Suddenly, the dead silence struck me: my ear missed the "ruckle," and
the occasional exclamations of delight. I turned abruptly, and glanced
at the child. She was standing still as a stone, with one hand just in
front of her holding the forgotten pipe, arrested on the way to her
mouth, as the heavenly vision struck her: rapt, lost in her eyes,
which were filled with wonder to the brim, open-mouthed, entranced,
with a smile on her lips of which she was totally unconscious, faint,
involuntary, seraphic, indescribable. The ecstasy of union had
swallowed her: she was gone. I called her by her name: she never
heard: her soul was away at the golden gates.

And I said to myself, as I gazed at her with intense curiosity, mixed
with regret that I was not Raffael, so marvellous was the picture:
This, this is the wisdom of the sages, the secret of Plotinus and the
Buddhists: this is Nirwana, Moksha, Yoga, the unattainable ecstasy of
bliss, the absolute fruition, which men call by many names: the end
towards which the adult