ars and the anger, matter to _that_? And in some amazing way this
thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry
with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter
to me? "Come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of
the world. "Whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the
inexhaustible offer life makes you. We are you, just as much as the past
is you."

It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely
multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to
me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....

I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it,
and it is not easy even to describe. And I fear that to you who will
have had I hope no experience of such shadows as I had passed through,
it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... I remember once I
came in a boat out of the caves of Han after two hours in the darkness,
and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and
its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like
waving flags and like the sunrise. And so it was with this mood of my
release.

There is a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom
people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that
sticks in my mind,--"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has
fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change
of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely
passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide
estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the
measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves--to a more
general self. I seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and
painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an
unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.

I suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious
people use it, is very much this experience. If it is not the same thing
it is something very closely akin. It is as if someone were scrambling
out of a pit into a largeness--a largeness that is attainable by every
man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.

I leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. I know that I went
back to my hotel in Vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to
me, and my