secret and meaning of the earth, the golden sun, the light, the foam-flecked
sea. Let my soul become enlarged; I am not enough ; I am little and
contemptible. I desire a great-ness of soul, an irradiance of mind, a
deeper insight, a broader
hope. Give me power of soul, so that I may actually effect by
its will that which I strive for.

In winter, though I could not then rest on the grass, or stay
long enough to form any definite expression, I still went up to the hill
once now and then, for it seemed that to merely visit the spot repeated all
that I had previously said. But it was not only then.

In summer I went out into the fields, and let my soul inspire
these thoughts under the trees, standing against the trunk, or looking up
through the branches at the sky. If trees could speak, hundreds of them
would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them. Leaning against the
oak's massive
trunk, and feeling the rough bark and the lichen at my back, looking
southwards over the grassy fields, cowslip-yellow, at the woods on the
slope, I thought my desire of deeper soul-life. Or under the green firs,
looking upwards, the sky was more deeply blue at their tops; then the brake
fern was unroll-
ing, the doves cooing, the thickets astir, the late ash-leaves
coming forth. Under the shapely rounded elms, by the hawthorn bushes and
hazel, everywhere the same deep desire for the soul-nature; to have from all
green things and from the sunlight the inner meaning which was not known to
them, that I might be full of light as the woods of the sun's rays. Just to
touch the lichened bark of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting
over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat
the same prayer in me.