butterflies went by, sometimes alighting on the green dome. Two thousand
years! Summer after summer the blue butterflies had visited the mound, the
thyme had flowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The azure morning had
spread its arms over the low tomb; and full glowing noon burned on it; the
purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy in the vapour of the
southern horizon, beamed at midnight through the mystic summer night, which
is dusky and yet full of light. White mists swept up and hid it; dews rested
on the turf; tender harebells drooped; the wings of the finches fanned the
air--finches whose colours faded from the wings how many centuries ago!
Brown autumn dwelt in the woods beneath; the rime of winter whitened the
beech clump on the ridge; again the buds came on the wind-blown hawthorn
bushes, and in the evening the broad constellation of Orion covered the
east. Two thousand times! Two thousand times the woods grew green, and
ring-doves built their nests. Day and night for two thousand years--light
and shadow sweeping over the mound--two thousand years of labour by day and
slumber by night. Mystery gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the
sunshine, speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for
twenty centuries round about this low and green-grown dome. Yet all that
mystery and wonder is as nothing to the Thought that lies therein, to the
spirit that I feel so close.

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness,
the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is
eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the
sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden
air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is
the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth,
now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are
absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a
thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past