the forward angles of the warehouses, the shadowed wharves were
quiet in shadows that carried light; far down the ships that
were hauling out moved in repose, and with the stream floated
away into the summer mist. There was a faint blue colour in the
air hovering between the built-up banks, against the lit walls,
in the hollows of the houses. The swallows wheeled and climbed, twittered
and glided downwards. Burning on, the great sun stood in the sky, heating
the parapet, glowing steadfastly upon me as when I rested in the narrow
valley grooved out in prehistoric
times. Burning on steadfast, and ever present as my thought.
Lighting the broad river, the broad walls; lighting the least speck of dust;
lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my
finger-nail. The fixed point of day--the sun. I was intensely
conscious of it; I felt it; I felt the presence of the immense
powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths of the ether. So
intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I felt too in
the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among the
immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I
saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than
the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment.

When, weary of walking on the pavements, I went to rest in the
National Gallery, I sat and rested before one or other of the
human pictures. I am not a picture lover: they are flat surfaces, but those
that I call human are nevertheless
beautiful. The knee in Daphnis and Chloe and the breast are
like living things; they draw the heart towards them, the heart
must love them. I lived in looking; without beauty there is no
life for me, the divine beauty of flesh is life itself to me.
The shoulder in the Surprise, the rounded rise of the bust, the