I met one of Wordsworth's old men today gathering faggots on the
shore. "I have been to all places and cities and I found no one happy
on the world, and now I wish me to be dead." ... Tonight I bowed in
silence under the vault of stars. To be holy is to lose the knowledge
of good and evil through "clinging Heaven by the hems." To refuse evil
is to refuse the apple _(malum)_ of the Tree of Knowledge. There is no
possibility of finding the ideal unless we look passionately for
nothing but the beauty of souls, seeing therein God's image and
refusing to perceive the clouds of evil. Circles lead to Heaven, but
straight lines to Hell. Straight lines are the tangents that "err"
from the sphere of the ideal. Miss C---- told me about a little boy
who was visiting Italy with his mother. He fell down hill, and stopped
before a roadside crucifix. And then he forgot his fall. They found
him crying as if his heart would break, and he told them that it was
because he was so sorry for that sad Man whom everybody had made
suffer so. The angels drop seed into our souls which make them
invisible to other men, and we also may plant seed with modesty and
humility. It is God's fernseed to mortals. How strange it is that we
measure time by moons, cold satellites, and thus the symbol of death.
But after all time is the dark night of the soul. I realized for the
first time today that I was born in December, the month of creation,
when the flame turns in upon itself in the hard cold earth and gives
birth to high hopes whose fulfilment are in eternity. It is the month
of Christmas on that account. I have begun to perceive what awful
wings my thoughts have, and know that they are given them by God
through me to carry them humbly into the most secret circle of the
Sacred Breast. We must do the labor of God with human hands, yet the
Labor of God is the Creation of Beauty. As the vegetable kingdom
renews its life once a year through time and so preserves its secret,
our souls must renew themselves in infinite recurrence through