touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the
familiar, making it break out into ineffable music. The trees
and the stars and the blue hills appear to us as symbols aching
with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. We seem to
watch the Master in the very act of creation of a new world when
a man's soul draws her heavy curtain of self aside, when her veil
is lifted and she is face to face with her eternal lover.

But what is this state? It is like a morning of spring, varied
in its life and beauty, yet one and entire. When a man's life
rescued from distractions finds its unity in the soul, then the
consciousness of the infinite becomes at once direct and natural
to it as the light is to the flame. All the conflicts and
contradictions of life are reconciled; knowledge, love and action
harmonized; pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and
renunciation equal in goodness; the breach between the finite and
the infinite fills with love and overflows; every moment carries
its message of the eternal; the formless appears to us in the
form of the flower, of the fruit; the boundless takes us up in
his arms as a father and walks by our side as a friend. It is
only the soul, the One in man which by its very nature can
overcome all limits, and finds its affinity with the Supreme One.
While yet we have not attained the internal harmony, and the
wholeness of our being, our life remains a life of habits. The
world still appears to us as a machine, to be mastered where it
is useful, to be guarded against where it is dangerous, and never
to be known in its full fellowship with us, alike in its physical
nature and in its spiritual life and beauty.