contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also.... [The insight in these other states] has a keynote invariably of reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictions and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melting into unity."[1]
The immortal may mingle with certain moods, perhaps, especially when violent contrast underlies the transition, and when deep yearnings, suppressed equally with violence, find their sudden radiant outlet. Since those Bronx Park days, when Nature caught me with such profound, uplifting magic, yet when thought was dumb and inarticulate, I am for ever coming across neat expressions by better minds than mine of what I then felt, and even believed I knew, in some unimagined way. Nature drew me, perhaps, away from life, while at the same time there glowed in my heart strange unrealizable desires to help life, to assist at her Utopian development, to work myself to the bone for the improvement of humanity. The contradiction, silly and high-flown though it now sounds, was then true. Inextinguishable fires to this end blazed in me, both mind and heart were literally on fire. My failure with Boyde, my meanness with Calder, to mention no graver lapses, both bit deep, but the intense longing to lose my Self in some Utopian cause was as strong as the other longing to be lost in the heart of some unstained and splendid wilderness of natural beauty. And the conflict puzzled me. Being inarticulate, I could not even find relief in words, though, as mentioned, I have often since discovered my feelings of those distant days expressed neatly enough by others. Only a few days ago I came across an instance:
"If Nature catches the soul young it is lost to humanity," groans Leroy, in a truly significant book of 1922.[2]
"No, no," replies the poet. "The earth spirit does
not draw us aside from life. How could that which is
- ↑ "Varieties of Religious Experience." William James.
- ↑ "The Interpreters," by A. E. The characters "interpret" the "relation of the politics of Time to the politics of Eternity."
