The Story of My Heart | Page 5

when I reached home.

Occasionally I went upon the hill deliberately, deeming it good to do so;
then, again, this craving carried me away up there of itself. Though the
principal feeling was the same, there were variations in the mode in
which it affected me.
Sometimes on lying down on the sward I first looked up at the sky,
gazing for a long time till I could see deep into the azure and my eyes
were full of the colour; then I turned my face to the grass and thyme,
placing my hands at each side of my face so as to shut out everything
and hide myself. Having drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt the
most glorious beauty of the day, and remembering the old, old, sea,
which (as it seemed to me) was but just yonder at the edge, I now
became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe. I
felt down deep into the earth under, and high above into the sky, and
farther still to the sun and stars. Still farther beyond the stars into the
hollow of space, and losing thus my separateness of being came to
seem like a part of the whole. Then I whisper-ed to the earth beneath,
through the gr ass and thyme, down into the depth of its ear, and again
up to the starry space hid behind the blue of day. Travelling in an
instant across the distant sea, I saw as if with actual vision the palms
and cocoanut trees, the bamboos of India, and the cedars of the extreme
south. Like a lake with islands the ocean lay before me, as clear and
vivid as the plain beneath in the midst of the amphitheatre of hills.
With the glory of the great sea, I said, with the firm, solid, and
sustaining earth; the depth, distance, and expanse of ether; the age,
tamelessness, and ceaseless motion of the ocean; the stars, and the
unknown in space; by all those things which are most powerful known
to me, and by those which exist, but of which I have no idea whatever,
I pray. Further, by my own soul, that secret existence which above all
other things bears the nearest resemblance to the ideal of spirit,
infinitely nearer than earth, sun, or star. Speaking by an inclination
towards, not in words, my soul prays that I may have something from
each of these, that I may gather a flower from them, that I may have in
myself the secret and meaning of the earth, the golden sun, the light,
the foam-flecked sea. Let my soul become enlarged; I am not enough ;
I am little and contemptible. I desire a great-ness of soul, an irradiance

of mind, a deeper insight, a broader hope. Give me power of soul, so
that I may actually effect by its will that which I strive for.
In winter, though I could not then rest on the grass, or stay long enough
to form any definite expression, I still went up to the hill once now and
then, for it seemed that to merely visit the spot repeated all that I had
previously said. But it was not only then.
In summer I went out into the fields, and let my soul inspire these
thoughts under the trees, standing against the trunk, or looking up
through the branches at the sky. If trees could speak, hundreds of them
would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them. Leaning
against the oak's massive trunk, and feeling the rough bark and the
lichen at my back, looking southwards over the grassy fields,
cowslip-yellow, at the woods on the slope, I thought my desire of
deeper soul-life. Or under the green firs, looking upwards, the sky was
more deeply blue at their tops; then the brake fern was unroll- ing, the
doves cooing, the thickets astir, the late ash-leaves coming forth. Under
the shapely rounded elms, by the hawthorn bushes and hazel,
everywhere the same deep desire for the soul-nature; to have from all
green things and from the sunlight the inner meaning which was not
known to them, that I might be full of light as the woods of the sun's
rays. Just to touch the lichened bark of a tree, or the end of a spray
projecting over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat the same prayer
in me.
The long-lived summer days dried and warmed the turf in the meadows.
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 halfclosed