unknown to him, and he did not care to know. And when at length he
learned that it came flowing out of the dark hard earth, the
mystery only grew. He imagined a wondrous cavity below in black
rock, where it gathered and gathered, nobody could think how--not
coming from anywhere else, but beginning just there, and nowhere
beyond. When, later on, he had to shift its source, and carry it
back to the great sky, it was no less marvellous, and more lovely;
it was a closer binding together of the gentle earth and the awful
withdrawing heavens. These were a region of endless hopes, and ever
recurrent despairs: that his beloved, an earthly finite thing,
should rise there, was added joy, and gave a mighty hope with
respect to the unknown and appalling. But from the sky, he was sent
back to the earth in further pursuit; for, whence came the rain,
his books told him, but from the sea? That sea he had read of,
though never yet beheld, and he knew it was magnificent in its
might; gladly would he have hailed it as an intermediate betwixt
the sky and the earth--so to have the sky come first! but, alas!
the ocean came first in order. And then, worse and worse! how was
the ocean fed but from his loved torrent? How was the sky fed but
from the sea? How was the dark fountain fed but from the sky? How
was the torrent fed but from the fountain? As he sat in the hot
garden, with his back against the old gray wall, the nest of his
family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in
his nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, it had begun
to dawn upon him that he had lost the stream of his childhood, the
mysterious, infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth,
of outflowing because of essential existence within! There was no
production any more, nothing but a mere rushing around, like the
ring-sea of Saturn, in a never ending circle of formal change! Like
a great dish, the mighty ocean was skimmed in particles invisible,