Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrous
present. For the day--the very moment I breathed, that second of time then
in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as all
that had gone before. Now, this moment was the wonder and the
glory.Now,this moment was exceedingly wonder-
ful. Now, this moment give me all the
thought, all the idea, ali the soul expressed in the cosmos
around me. Give me still more, for the interminable universe,
past and present, is but earth; give me the unknown soul, wholly
apart from it, the soul of which I know only that when I touch
the ground, when the sunlight touches my hand,it is not there. Therefore
the heart looks into space to be away from earth. With all the cycles, and
the sunlight streaming through them, with all that is meant by the present,
I thought in the deep vale and prayed.

There was a secluded spring to which I sometimes went to drink
the pure water, lifting it in the hollow of my hand. Drinking
the lucid water, clear as light itself in solution, I absorbed
the beauty and purity of it. I drank the thought of the element; I desired
soul-nature pure and limpid. When I saw the
sparkling dew on the grass--a rainbow broken into drops--it called up the
same thought-prayer. The stormy wind whose sudden twists laid the trees on
the ground woke the same feeling; my heart shouted with it. The soft summer
air which entered when I
opened my window in the morning breathed the same sweet desire.
At night, before sleeping, I always looked out at the shadowy trees, the
hills looming indistinctly in the dark, a star seen between the drifting
clouds; prayer of soul-life always. I chose the highest room, bare and
gaunt, because as I sat at work I could look out and see more of the wide
earth, more of the dome of the sky, and could think my desire through these.