wall
of cloud seemed to rise sheer from the water and join the gray sky
that arched over the great flat spaces. And in the absence of stars,
the earth itself seemed to gain in vastness and mystery, its own
awfulness, as it sped round, unlessened by those endless perspectives
of vaster planets. And from the soundless night and sea and sky, and
from those austere and solemn stretches of sand and forest, wherein
forms and colors were lost in a brooding unity, there came to Spinoza
a fresh uplifting sense of the infinite, timeless Substance, to love
and worship which was exaltation and ecstasy. The lonely thinker
communed with the lonely Being.

"Though He slay me," his heart whispered, "yet will I trust in Him."

Yea, though the wheels of things had passed over his body, it was
still his to rejoice in the eternal movement that brought happiness to
others.

Others! How full the world was of existences, each perfect after its
kind, the laws of God's nature freely producing every conception of
His infinite intellect. In man alone how many genera, species,
individuals--from saints to criminals, from old philosophers to
gallant young livers, all to be understood, none to be hated. And man
but a fraction of the life of one little globe, that turned not on
man's axis, nor moved wholly to man's ends. This sea that stretched
away unheaving was not sublimely dead--even to the vulgar
apprehension--but penetrated with quivering sensibility, the exquisite
fresh feeling of fishes darting and gliding, tingling with life in fin
and tail, chasing and chased, zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in
the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of
animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and
creeping populations, the soil riddled with the sluggish
voluptuousness of worms; each tiniest creature a perfect expression of
the idea of its essence, individualized by its conatus, its effort to
persist in existence on its own lines, though in man alone the
potentiality of entering through selfless Reason into the intellectual
ecstasy of the love with which God loves Himself--to be glad of the
strength of the lion and the grace of the gazelle and the beauty of
the woman who belongs to another. Blessings on the happy lovers,
blessings on all the wonderful creation, praise, praise to the Eternal
Being whose modes body forth the everlasting pageant.

Beginningless aeons before his birth It had been--the great page