§ 41
It is well now and again, I think, to withdraw into the holy of holies of one's own self, "where dwells the Nameless,"[22] in its shapeless and vague impenetrability, "as a cloud." The world is too much with us. The myriad trivial details of everyday life hide from us that of which they ought in reality perpetually to remind us. For, after all, what is all action, even as manifested in these trivial details, but a struggle to overcome space and time, the limitations of the finite; and what, again, is all thought but a struggle to conceive the infinite?
§ 42
Yet another thought this spacious prospect gave me. The endless green fields and the endless blue lake seemed a symbol of the unrealisability of the ideal. With both I was enamoured, and with the beauty of both I craved in some dim and unknown way to take my fill of delight: both were at my feet, but both stretched away and away until they met the eternal and unapproachable heavens at the horizon. Yes, the fields were green, but not the spot on which I stood; the water was blue, but not in the cup with which I tried to assuage my thirst.—But there is a limit to ontological and psychological speculations of sombre hue.