could bear. He was a wild thing at heart,
a wild thing who had lain at night in forests,
and gone to sleep to the noise of the susurrus
of the wind in the pines, and awakened to
meet the orange lips of the rising sun, kissing
the dark tops of the trees, and turning them
to purple-red; gone to sleep on the sand, to
wake and find the waves kissing his feet,
and sometimes not gone to sleep at all, but
wandered across deserts, afraid to go to sleep,
furrowing the sand as if his body were a
plough, emerging exhausted, but triumphant,
from places where the silent tread of the
Indian had failed. He had traced the lion,
the panther, the tiger to their lair, and
climbed mountains to find a tiny plant no
bigger than a daisy; and he had dreamed,
God! how he had dreamed, by rivers, by
streams, by brooks, by rivulets, beneath the
moon and the stars, the sunshine, and even
beneath the rain, the storm. The voices of
Nature lured him, lured him; and he had
learned many of its secrets, and found that
it was profound, full of design, of purpose
of thought renewed, with ever-resurrecting
vigour. Eternity-he had gauged its power,
realised that it lay in the fact of its unceasing
continuity of thought, its constant revival, its
evenness, its rhythmic recurrence, undaunted,
