this endless water when he grew weary, when the things about him
put on their too ordinary look. Let the aspect of this be what it
might, it seemed still inspired and sent forth by some essence of
mystery and endless possibility. There was in him an unusual
combination of the power to read the hieroglyphic internal aspect
of things, and the scientific nature that bows before fact. He knew
that the stream was in its second stage when it rose from the earth
and rushed past the house, that it was gathered first from the
great ocean, through millions of smallest ducts, up to the
reservoirs of the sky, thence to descend in snows and rains, and
wander down and up through the veins of the earth; but the sense of
its mystery had not hitherto begun to withdraw. Happily for him,
the poetic nature was not merely predominant in him, but dominant,
sending itself, a pervading spirit, through the science that else
would have stifled him. Accepting fact, he found nothing in its
outward relations by which a man can live, any more than by bread;
but this poetic nature, illuminating it as with the polarized ray,
revealed therein more life and richer hope. All this was as yet
however as indefinite as it was operative in him, and I am telling
of him what he could not have told of himself.

He stood gazing now in a different mood from any that had come to
him before: he had begun to find out something fresh about this
same stream, and the life in his own heart to which it served as a
revealing phantasm. He recognized that what in the stream had drawn
him from earliest childhood, with an infinite pleasure, was the
vague sense, for a long time an ever growing one, of its
MYSTERY--the form the infinite first takes to the simplest and
liveliest hearts. It was because it was ALWAYS flowing that he
loved it, because it could not stop: whence it came was utterly