The Garden of Survival by Algernon Blackwood
page 64 of 77 (83%)
page 64 of 77 (83%)
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had worked upon me its amazing alchemy.
There, in fewest possible words, is what had happened. I remember that for a long time, then, I waited in the hush of my childhood's garden, listening, as it were, with every pore, and conscious that some one who was pleased interpreted the beauty to my soul. It seemed, as I said, a message of a personal kind. It was regenerative, moveover, in so far that life was enlarged and lifted upon a nobler scale; new sources of power were open to me; I saw a better way. Irresistibly it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit. No figure, thank God, was visible, no voice was audible, but a presence there indubitably was, and, whether I responded or otherwise, would be always there. And the power was such that I felt as though the desire of the planet itself yearned through it for expression. X I WATCHED the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts, following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into the half-forgotten past. . . . They led me again through the maze of gorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, that had marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had known fulfilment. . . . I stole back with them, past the long exile in great |
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