to see clearer and with wider sympathies. The glamour of
modern science and discoveries faded away, for I found them no
more than the first potter's wheel. Erasure and reception
proceeded together; the past accumulations of casuistry were
erased, and my thought widened to receive the idea of something
beyond all previous ideas. With disbelief, belief increased.
The aspiration and hope, the prayer, was the same as that which
I felt years before on the hills, only it now broadened.

Experience of life, instead of curtailing and checking my prayer, led me to
reject experience altogether. As well might
the horse believe that the road the bridle forces it to traverse
every day encircles the earth as I believe in experience. All
the experience of the greatest city in the world could not
withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed before
the sun, in the presence of the earth and air, in the presence
of the immense forces of the universe. I demand that which will make me more
perfect now, this hour. London convinced me of my own thought. That thought
has always been with me, and always grows wider.

One midsummer I went out of the road into the fields, and sat
down on the grass between the yellowing wheat and the green
hawthorn bushes. The sun burned in the sky, the wheat was full
of a luxuriant sense of growth, the grass high, the earth giving
its vigour to tree and leaf, the heaven blue. The vigour and
growth, the warmth and light, the beauty and richness of it
entered into me; an ecstasy of soul accompanied the delicate
excitement of the senses: the soul rose with the body. Rapt in
the fulness of the moment, I prayed there with all that
expansion of mind and frame; no words, no definition,