The Story of My Heart | Page 6

eyes to bear the dazzling light. Bees buzzed over me,
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 longdrawn life of the earth back
into the dimmest past, while the sun of the moment was warm on me.
Sesostris on the most ancient sands of the south,in ancient, ancient days,

was conscious of himself and of the sun. This sunlight linked me
through the ages to that past consciousness. From all the ages my soul
desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the
sunbeams had continually poured on earth. As the hot sands take up the
heat, so would I take up that soul-energy. Dreamy in appearance, I was
breathing full of existence; I was aware of the grass blades, the flowers,
the leaves on hawth orn and tree. I seemed to live more largely through
them, as if each were a pore through which I drank. The grasshoppers
called and leaped, the greenfinches sang, the blackbirds happily fluted,
all the air hummed with life. I was plunged deep in existence, and with
all that existence I prayed.
Through every grass blade in the thousand, thousand grasses; through
the million leaves, veined and edge-cut, on bush and tree; through the
song-notes and the marked feathers of the birds; through the insects'
hum and the colour of the butterflies; through the soft warm air, the
flecks of clouds dissolving--I used them all for prayer. With all the
energy the sunbeams had poured unwearied on the earth since Sesostris
was conscious of them on the ancient sands; with all the life that had
been lived by vigorous man and beauteous woman since first in dearest
Greece the dream of the gods was woven; with all the soul-life that had
flowed a long stream down to me, I prayed that I might have a soul
more than equal to, far beyond my conception of, these things of the
past, the present, and the fulness of all life. Not only equal to these, but
beyond, higher, and more powerful than I could imagine. That I might
take from all their energy, grandeur, and beauty, and gather it into me.
That my soul might be more than the cosmos of life.
I prayed with the glowing clouds of sun-set and the soft light of the first
star coming through the violet sky. At night with the stars, according to
the season : now with the Pleiades, now with the Swan or burning
Sirius, and broad Orion's whole constellation, red Aldebaran, Arcturus,
and the Northern Crown; with the morning star, the lightbringer, once
now and then when I saw it, a white-gold ball in the violet-purple sky,
or framed about with pale summer vapour floating away as red streaks
shot horizontally in the east. A diffused saffron ascended into the
luminous upper azure. The disk of the sun rose over the hill, fluctuating

with throbs of light; his chest heaved in fervour of brilliance. All the
glory of the sunrise filled me with broader and furnace-like vehemence
of prayer. That I might have the deepest of soul-life, the deepest of all,
deeper far than all this greatness of the visible universe and even of the
invisible; that I might have a fulness of soul till now unknown, and
utterly beyond my own conception.
In the deepest darkness of the night the same thought rose in my mind
as in the bright light of noontide. What is there which I have not used to
strengthen the same emotion?

CHAPTER II
SOMETIMES I went to a deep, narrow valleyin 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 grey 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 footof the slope
where these thoughts burned into me. How many, many years, how
many cycles of years, how many bundles ofcycles 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