Sometimes on lying down on the sward I first looked up at the
sky, gazing for a long time till I could see deep into the azure
and my eyes were full of the colour; then I turned my face to
the grass and thyme, placing my hands at each side of my face
so as to shut out everything and hide myself. Having drunk deeply of the
heaven above and felt the most glorious beauty of
the day, and remembering the old, old, sea, which (as it seemed
to me) was but just yonder at the edge, I now became lost, and
absorbed into the being or existence of the universe. I felt
down deep into the earth under, and high above into the sky, and
farther still to the sun and stars. Still farther beyond the stars into the
hollow of space, and losing thus my separateness of being came to seem like
a part of the whole. Then I whisper-ed to the earth beneath, through the gr
ass and thyme, down into the depth of its ear, and again up to the starry
space hid behind the blue of day. Travelling in an instant across the
distant sea, I saw as if with actual vision the palms and
cocoanut trees, the bamboos of India, and the cedars of the extreme south.
Like a lake with islands the ocean lay before me, as clear and vivid as the
plain beneath in the midst of the amphitheatre of hills.

With the glory of the great sea, I said, with the firm, solid,
and sustaining earth; the depth, distance, and expanse of ether;
the age, tamelessness, and ceaseless motion of the ocean; the
stars, and the unknown in space; by all those things which are
most powerful known to me, and by those which exist, but of which I have no
idea whatever, I pray. Further, by my own soul, that secret existence which
above all other things bears the nearest resemblance to the ideal of spirit,
infinitely nearer than earth, sun, or star. Speaking by an inclination
towards, not in words, my soul prays that I may have something from each of
these, that I may gather a flower from them, that I may have in myself the