stood on a high mountain with a railroad in the valley, and saw a
great freight-engine stop still and pour out its masses of dense
black smoke. It rose in the breathless air, straight as a column,
high and majestic; and Thyrsis thought of that line. It carried him
out into the heavens, and he knew that a flash of poetry such as
that is the meeting of man's groping hand with God's.

It was about here that a strange adventure came to him. It was
midwinter, and he went out, long after midnight, to walk in a
beautiful garden. A dry powdery snow crunched beneath his feet, and
overhead the stars gleamed and quivered, so bright that he felt like
stretching out his hands to them. The world lay still, and awful in
its beauty; and here suddenly, unsuspected--unheralded, and quite
unsought--there came to Thyrsis a strange and portentous experience,
the first of his ecstasies.

He could not have told whether he walked or sat down, whether he
spoke or was silent; he lost all sense of his own existence--his
consciousness was given up to the people of his dreams, the
companions and lovers of his fancy. The cold and snow were gone, and
there was a moonlit glade in a forest; and thither they came, one by
one, friendly and human, yet in the full panoply of their splendor
and grace. There were Shelley and Milton, and the gentle and
troubled Hamlet, and the sorrowful knight of la Mancha, with the
irrepressible Falstaff to hearten them all; a strangely-assorted
company, yet royal spirits all of them, and no strangers to each
other in their own world. And here they gathered and conversed, each
in his own vein and from his own impulse, with gracious fancy and
lofty vision and heart-easing mirth. And ah, how many miles would
one have travelled to be with them!