The wildflower too: you recall once--it was above Igls when the
Tyrolean snows were melting--how we found a sudden gentian on the
dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked
all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single
blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that
star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the
whole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distant
avalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of the
torrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrast
the incredible stillness of the heights--then, suddenly, this star of
blue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and my
own--wonder, joy, as of something unearthly--that took us by
surprise.

In these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; while
it lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyes
of the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps
out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are
its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the
essential meaning of the thrill--that Heaven is here and now. The
gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that
opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening--upon
the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of
Eternity is yours for ever--now.

I am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart,
not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know now
better than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein,
unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, the
fragrance and the birds we know together. . . . They tell me--even our