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Walter Besant
The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies

CHAPTER X.
"THE STORY OF MY HEART."

In the history of literature one happens, from time to time, upon a book which has been written because the author had no choice but to write it. He was compelled by hidden forces to write it. There was no rest for him, day or night, so soon as the book was complete in his mind, until he sat down to write it. And then he wrote it at a white heat. For eighteen years, Jefferies says, he pondered over this book – he means, that he brooded over these and cognate subjects from the time of adolescence. At last his mind was full, and then – but not till then – he wrote it.

Those who have not read it must understand at the outset that it is the book of one who dares to question for himself on the most important subject which can occupy the mind. To some men – very young men especially – it seems an easy thing to question and to go on following the questions to their logical end. An older man knows better; he has learned, perhaps by his own experience, that to carry on unto the end such an inquiry, fearless of whither it may lead, is an act requiring very great courage, clearness and strength of mind, and carelessness of other men's opinion. It is, in fact, an act which to begin and to carry through is beyond the courage and the mental powers of most. I do not mean the so-called intellectual process gone through by every young man who takes up the common carping and girding at received forms of religion, and boldly declares among an admiring circle that he renounces them all – I mean a long, patient, and wholly reverent inquiry by whatever line or lines may be possible to a man. For it must not be forgotten that, though there are many lines of independent research and inquiry, there are few men to whom even one is actually possible. This, however, we do not openly acknowledge; every person, however illiterate and untrained, considers himself, not only free, but also qualified, to be an advocate, or an opponent, of religion. Freedom of thought is so great a thing that one would not have it otherwise. As for the lines of inquiry, scientific men, of whom there are few, apply scientific methods to certain books held sacred by the Church, with whatever results may happen; some scientific men, after this research, find that they can remain Christians, others resigning, at least, the orthodox form of that faith. Scholars of language, mythology, Oriental antiquities, of whom also there are comparatively few, may approach the subject by these lines. Others, like the late Mr. Cotter Morison, the like of whom are rare, may consider the subject in relation to the history, development, and proved effect of certain doctrines upon humanity. Others, again, assuming that the pretensions of priests essentially belong to the Christian religion, may compare these pretensions with those of other and older religions. Again, the difficulty or impossibility of reconciling statements in so-called inspired works, the incongruity of ancient Oriental customs as compared with modern and European ideas – these and many other points, all of which require a scholar to deal with them, may furnish lines of investigation. But, indeed, the modes of attack may be indefinitely varied. On all sides, doctrinal religion has been, and is daily, attacked; at all points it has been, and is daily, defended to the full satisfaction of the defenders. The assailants can never perceive that they are beaten off at every point; the defenders can never be made to understand that their stronghold has been utterly demolished.

The Religious Problem at the present moment has been, in fact, so far advanced that research, defence, or attack by persons not qualified by special education in one or other of these lines is absolutely futile. For the greater number, dulness of perception, ignorance, want of early training, self-conceit, and that sheer incapacity either to perceive or to tell the truth which seems to be a special firmity of the age, make research impossible, attack futile, and defence powerless. And even for those who seem to have the right to lead, the fact that we are born into the ideas of our time, as well as into its creeds and traditions, is a dire obstacle to clearness of vision. We are surrounded, from birth upwards, by a network of ideas, many false, many conventional, many mere prejudices. But, such as they are, they tear the flesh if we try to break through them; by reason of these bonds we cannot march straight, we cannot see clearly. Education, reading, the literature, and the common talk of the day, so far from helping us, seem only to raise up thicker clouds about us which we cannot disperse, neither can we pass through them.

Does, then, this act of superlative courage, demanded by fearless inquiry, always lead the man who has achieved it towards atheism or agnosticism? Not so. The history of the Churches shows that there have been many men who have embarked upon such an inquiry honestly and boldly, and have come out of it armed and strengthened with a natural religion upon which they have been able to graft a Christianity far deeper, stronger, and more real than that which is commonly taught in the pulpits, the schools, the catechisms, and the litanies of the Churches. But, as we said before, such an inquiry is not possible for every man.

In Jefferies' "Story of My Heart" we have a tale half told. You may read in it, if you will, the abandonment, rather than the loss, of his early faith; you cannot read in it, but you shall hear, if you persist to the end of this volume, how he found it again. But the man who has once thrown off the old yoke of Authority can never put it on again. Henceforth he stands alone, yet not alone, for he is face to face with his God.

Again, the network of custom and tradition which lies around us contains all our friends as well as ourselves. Those who are unlucky (or lucky) enough to break through and to get outside it have to separate themselves from their friends; they have to find new friends – which is difficult – new companions, at least. And then the novel position is a kind of standing challenge to old friends. The old equality is gone, because, if the new philosopher is right, he is intellectually far above his associates. And since friendship cannot endure the loss of equality, the ties of years are severed. Instead of the warmth of friendship, one feels, with the coldness, the reproach of isolation. This is a consideration, however, which would weigh little with Jefferies, who lived, of free choice, in isolation.

Again, many men find a sufficient support on the great questions of faith – which they seldom or never formulate to themselves – in the fact that certain men, whom they very deeply venerate, believe in certain doctrines. That such a man as Dean Stanley, for instance – a scholar, a man of unblemished life, whose purity of soul and natural nobility of character lifted him high above the average of man – was also a devout Christian, and a pillar of the Church of England, has been, and is still, a solid guarantee to thousands who remember his example that the religion which was able to light his feet through the valley of death, and to sustain his heart while life was ebbing, must be true. This is a kindly and a natural aid to faith. And it is another illustration of the immense, the boundless influence of example. The mediæval scholar believed in the Christian religion because even the horrible scandals of Rome could not destroy it. The modern Churchman modestly and humbly believes his creed mainly because men very greatly his superiors in learning and in elevation of soul believe it, and find in it their greatest consolation, and their only hope. Jefferies had no such reverence. The great leaders of the Church came not to the Wiltshire Downs. His own reason should suffice for himself. Was he, therefore, presumptuous? While any rags of Protestant independence and freedom of thought yet linger among us, let us, a thousand times, say, No!

Other men, as is well known, take refuge in Authority. This seems so easy as to be elementary in its simplicity. Authority does not interfere with the practical business of life, with the getting as much wealth as we can, and as much enjoyment as we can, while life lasts. And after death Authority kindly assures us that all shall be done for us to ensure ultimate enjoyment of more good things. We cannot, certainly, all seek into the origins and causes of things; some must listen and obey. There is the Authority of example; there is also the Authority of Church rule and discipline. But Jefferies was one of those who cannot listen and obey.

Most books which deal with the difficulties and the loss of faith deal also largely at the outset with the bitterness and the agonies of the soul when doubt begins; with the long discussions based upon premises which are first questioned tentatively, and then wholly denied; with the consequent estrangement of friends; with the laying down of one set of shackles in order to take up another, as when a man, after infinite heart-searchings, exchanges one little sect for another.

Others, again, who think it necessary to put aside their religion, do so with a curious rage. They vehemently despise, and have no words too strong for their contempt of those who refuse to follow them. As for the doctrines themselves, they are – these renegades cry aloud – unworthy the consideration of any who have the least pretensions to intellect. Everybody knows this kind. The pervert – the renegade – is the fiercest of persecutors, the most intolerant in practice. The bitterness in his mind is caused, or it is increased, by the galling fact that though he is a rebel, he is always, whatever sect he has abandoned, an unsuccessful rebel. His old king yet reigneth; he cannot dethrone that king; it is impossible for him; at the most he can but seduce from their allegiance a few, and for all his railing the loyal subjects of that king remain loyal.

Jefferies, for his part, has no agonies of soul to chronicle, nor does he watch for and set down the stages of unbelief, nor does he tell us of any arguments with friends. The local curate is never considered or consulted; friends are neglected; and he is not in the least degree angry with those who remain loyal to their old religion.

In point of fact, this remarkable book never mentions the old religion at all. This is a very singular – even an unique – method of treatment. There is no question of the common lines of research: not one of them is followed. The author begins, and he goes on, with the assumption that there is no religion at all which need be considered. On the broad downs the only bell ever heard is the distant sheep-bell, the only hymn of praise is the song of the lark. He has wandered among these lonely hills until he has forgotten the village church and all that he was taught there. Everything has clean escaped his memory. It is not that the old teaching no longer guides his conduct; the old teaching no longer lives at all in his mind.

He has communed so much with Nature that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. Nothing else seems worth thinking of. He lies upon the turf and feels the embrace of the great round world.

"I used to lie down in solitary corners at full length on my back, so as to feel the embrace of the earth. The grass stood high above me, and the shadows of the tree-branches danced on my face. I looked up at the sky, with half-closed eyes to bear the dazzling light. Bees buzzed over, sometimes a butterfly passed, there was a hum in the air, greenfinches sang in the hedge. Gradually entering into the intense life of the summer days – a life which burned around as if every grass-blade and leaf were a torch – I came to feel the long-drawn life of the earth back into the dimmest past, while the sun of the moment was warm on me… This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness."

Again, he says that, wandering alone, he spoke in his soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight:

"I thought of the earth's firmness – I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air – its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea, though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory."

Everything is so full of life, everything around him, the grass-blades, the flowers, the leaves, the grasshoppers, the birds; all the air is so full of life that he himself seems to live more largely only by being conscious of this multitudinous life. And at length he prays. He prays for a deeper and a fuller soul, that he may take from all something of their grandeur, beauty, and energy, and gather it to himself. In answer – let us think – to this prayer there was granted unto him a Vision. To every man who truly meditates and prays, there comes in the end a Vision – a Vision of a Flying Roll; a Vision of Four Chariots; a Vision of a Basket of Summer Fruit. To this man came the Vision, rarely granted, of the infinite possibilities in man. He saw how much greater and grander he might become, how his senses might be intensified, how his frame might be perfected, how his soul might become fuller. Morning, noon, and night he sees this Vision, and he prays continually for that increased fulness of soul which is the chief splendour of his Vision.

"Sometimes I went to a deep, narrow valley in the hills, silent and solitary. The sky crossed from side to side, like a roof supported on two walls of green. Sparrows chirped in the wheat at the verge above, their calls falling like the twittering of swallows from the air. There was no other sound. The short grass was dried gray as it grew by the heat; the sun hung over the narrow vale as if it had been put there by hand. Burning, burning, the sun glowed on the sward at the foot of the slope where these thoughts burned into me. How many, many years, how many cycles of years, how many bundles of cycles of years, had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow? Since it was formed how long? Since it was worn and shaped, groove-like, in the flanks of the hills by mighty forces which had ebbed. Alone with the sun which glowed on the work when it was done, I saw back through space to the old time of tree-ferns, of the lizard flying through the air, the lizard-dragon wallowing in sea foam, the mountainous creatures, twice elephantine, feeding on land; all the crooked sequence of life. The dragon-fly which passed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked on stone in those days. The immense time lifted me like a wave rolling under a boat; my mind seemed to raise itself as the swell of the cycles came; it felt strong with the power of the ages. With all that time and power I prayed: that I might have in my soul the intellectual part of it; the idea, the thought. Like a shuttle the mind shot to and fro the past and the present, in an instant.

"Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrous present. For the day – the very moment I breathed, that second of time then in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as all that had gone before. Now, this moment, was the wonder and the glory. Now, this moment, was exceedingly wonderful. Now, this moment, give me all the thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in the cosmos around me. Give me still more, for the interminable universe, past and present, is but earth; give me the unknown soul, wholly apart from it, the soul of which I know only that when I touch the ground, when the sunlight touches my hand, it is not there. Therefore the heart looks into space to be away from earth. With all the cycles, and the sunlight streaming through them, with all that is meant by the present, I thought in the deep vale and prayed."

Presently, the vague yearning – this passionate prayer for the realization of a splendid Vision – takes a more definite shape:

"First, I desired that I might do or find something to exalt the soul, something to enable it to live its own life, a more powerful existence now. Secondly, I desired to be able to do something for the flesh, to make a discovery or perfect a method by which the fleshly body might enjoy more pleasure, longer life, and suffer less pain. Thirdly, to construct a more flexible engine with which to carry into execution the design of the will."

As for the soul, his prayer was for the life beyond this.

"Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death did not seem to me to affect the personality. In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not immediately become inaccessible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable distance. Look at another person while living; the soul is not visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it does not still live. The condition of being unseen is the same condition which occurs while the body is living, so that intrinsically there is nothing exceptional, or supernatural, in the life of the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural, as natural and simple as the grass waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the larks' songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like earth. Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning."

Three things, he says, were found twelve thousand years ago by prehistoric man: the existence of the soul, immortality, the Deity. Since then, nothing further has been found. Well, he would find something more. What is it he would find? It can only be discovered by one who has that fulness of the soul for which he prays.

"As I write these words, in the very moment, I feel that the whole air, the sunshine out yonder lighting up the ploughed earth, the distant sky, the circumambient ether, and that far space, is full of soul-secrets, soul-life, things outside the experience of all the ages. The fact of my own existence as I write, as I exist at this second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like, strange, and supernatural to me, that I unhesitatingly conclude I am always on the margin of life illimitable, and that there are higher conditions than existence. Everything around is supernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning."

It is only by the soul that one lives. As for Nature, everything in her is anti-human. Nothing in Nature cares for man. The earth would let him perish, and would not trouble, for his sake, to bring forth food or water. The sun would scorch and burn him. He cannot drink the sea. The wild creatures would mangle and slay him. Diseases would rack him. The very things which most he loves live for themselves, and not for him. If all mankind were to die to-morrow, Nature would still go on, careless of his fate. There is no spirit, no intelligence in Nature. And in the events of human life, everything, he says, happens by pure chance. No prudence in conduct, no wisdom or foresight, can effect anything. The most trivial circumstance – the smallest accident is sufficient to upset the deepest plan of the wisest mind. All things happen by chance. This, then, is the melancholy outcome of all his passionate love of Nature. It is to this conclusion that he has been brought by his solitary communion with Nature. Man is quite alone, he says, without help and without hope of guidance. The Deity – but, then, what does he mean by a Deity? He means, I think, only the popular and vulgar conception – suffers everything to take place by chance. Yet there is, there must be, because he feels it and sees it, something higher and beyond. "For want of words I write soul."

The book is full of this Vision of the Life beyond the present; he tries, but sometimes in vain, to clothe his Vision with words. It never leaves him. It is with him in the heart of London, where the tides of life converge to the broad area before the Royal Exchange. If he goes to see the pictures in the National Gallery, it is with him. If he looks at the old sculpture in the Museum, it is still with him. Always the dream of the perfect man superior to death and to change; perfect in physical beauty, perfect in mind.

"I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves – my soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea's might. 'Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things, give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea.'

"Then I rested, sitting by the wheat; the bank of beach was between me and the sea, but the waves beat against it; the sea was there, the sea was present and at hand. By the dry wheat I rested; I did not think; I was inhaling the richness of the sea; all the strength and depth of meaning of the sea and earth came to me again. I rubbed out some of the wheat in my hands, I took up a piece of clod and crumbled it in my fingers – it was a joy to touch it – I held my hand so that I could see the sunlight gleam on the slightly moist surface of the skin. The earth and sun were to me like my flesh and blood, and the air of the sea life.

"With all the greater existence I drew from them I prayed for a bodily life equal to it, for a soul-life beyond my thought, for my inexpressible desire of more than I could shape even into idea. There was something higher than idea, invisible to thought as air to the eye; give me bodily life equal in fulness to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched it, and said farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was a real pilgrimage."

 

There is much more – a great deal more – in this remarkable book; but what follows is mostly an amplification of what has gone before. He dwells upon the striving after physical perfection, the sacred duty of every man and woman to enrich and strengthen their physical life, by care, exercise, and in every possible way.

"I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy – blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship – to see a perfect human body unveiled causes a sense of worship. The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended by increase of soul beauty. The soul is the higher even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly perfect."

Do not misunderstand him. This intense craving after physical perfection, this yearning after beauty, is not a sensual craving. It is not the Greek's love of perfect form, though Jefferies had this love, as well. It is far more than this; it means, in the mind of this man, that without perfection of the body there can be no perfect life of the soul.

In that letter where the Apostle Paul speaks at length of Death and the Resurrection, he concludes with the assurance – he writes for his own consolation, I think, as well as that of his disciples – that the body, as well as the soul, shall live again; but the body glorified, made perfect and beautiful beyond human power of thought, to be wedded to the soul purified beyond human power of understanding. Is it not strange that this solitary questioner, longing and praying for a deeper and fuller understanding – a fuller soul – should also have arrived at the perception of the wonderful truth that the perfect soul demands the perfect body? In his mind there are no echoes ringing of Paul's great Vision – the whole of his old creed, all of it, has fallen from him and is lost: it is his own Vision granted to himself. How? After long and solitary meditation on the hillside, as in the old times great Visions came to those who fasted in their lonely cells and solitary caves. Great thoughts come not to those who seek them not. The mind which would receive them must be first prepared. The example of Jefferies, whose great thoughts only came to him after long years of meditation apart from man, may make us understand the Visions which used to reward the monk, the fakir, the hermit of the lonely laura.

Then he goes back to his theory that everything happens by chance. So long as men believe that everything is done for them, progress is impossible. Once grasp the truth that nothing is done for man, and that he has everything to do for himself, and all is possible. Still, this is not a proof that chance rules the world. And, again, the fact that man, alone of created beings, is able to grasp this, or any other truth, is not that gift everything in itself?

"Nothing whatsoever is done for us. We are born naked, and not even protected by a shaggy covering. Nothing is done for us. The first and strongest command (using the word to convey the idea only) that nature, the universe, our own bodies give is to do everything for ourselves. The sea does not make boats for us, nor the earth of her own will build us hospitals. The injured lie bleeding, and no invisible power lifts them up. The maidens were scorched in the midst of their devotions, and their remains make a mound hundreds of yards long. The infants perished in the snow, and the ravens tore their limbs. Those in the theatre crushed each other to the death-agony. For how long, for how many thousand years, must the earth and the sea, and the fire and the air, utter these things and force them upon us before they are admitted in their full significance?

"These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose body has been racked by pain, from every human being who has suffered from accident or disease, from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up a continually-increasing cry louder than the thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listen to, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstition, and the wax of criminal selfishness: – These miseries are your doing, because you have mind and thought, and could have prevented them. You can prevent them in the future. You do not even try.

"It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception are preventible, or if not so, that they can be so weakened as to do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents are preventible; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old age, and that if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged far beyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible that at the present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one single person ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is no such thing as a natural cause of death. They die of disease or weakness which is the result of disease, either in themselves or in their ancestors. No such thing as old age is known to us. We do not even know what old age would be like, because no one ever lives to it."

This remarkable book is a record almost, if not quite, unique. The writer is not a man of science; he has not been trained in logic and dialectics, he is not a scholar, though he has read much. But he can think for himself, and he has the gift of carrying on the same line of thought unwearied, persistent, like a bloodhound on the scent, year after year. And as a record it is absolutely true; there are no concealments in it, no affectations; it is all true. He has gone to Nature – the Nature he loves so well – for an answer to the problems that vex his soul. Nature replies with a stony stare; she has no answer. What is man? She cares nothing for man. Everything, so far as she knows, and so far as man is concerned, takes place by chance. Then he gets his Vision of the Perfect Soul, and it fills his heart and makes him happy, and seems to satisfy all his longings. And the old Christian teaching, the prayer to the Father, the village church and its services, the quiet churchyard – where are they? Out on the wild downs you do not see or hear of them at all. They are not in the whisper of the air, or in the rustle of the grass-blades; they are not in the sunshine; they are not in the cloud; they are not in the depths of the azure sky.

And so he concludes:

"I have only just commenced to realize the immensity of thought which lies outside the knowledge of the senses. Still, on the hills and by the sea-shore, I seek and pray deeper than ever. The sun burns southwards over the sea and before the wave runs its shadow, constantly slipping on the advancing slope till it curls and covers its dark image at the shore. Over the rim of the horizon waves are flowing as high and wide as those that break upon the beach. These that come to me and beat the trembling shore are like the thoughts that have been known so long; like the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts that have broken on the strand of mind for thousands of years. Beyond and over the horizon I feel that there are other waves of ideas unknown to me, flowing as the stream of ocean flows. Knowledge of facts is limitless, they lie at my feet innumerable like the countless pebbles; knowledge of thought so circumscribed! Ever the same thoughts come that have been written down centuries and centuries.

"Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green-gray wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loath to leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder: the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.

"Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the wash swells and circles about my feet, I lave my hands in it, I lift a little in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beats upon the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sun burns brightly; – the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.

"Leaving the shore, I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long grass foam-flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than Deity. The great sun burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble – all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part – the psyche – were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life."