For the power to understand it vanished; no part of him knew sympathy with it; so clearly he now saw himself sharing the Earth, that a vague wonder filled him when he recalled the mad desires of men to possess external forms of things. It was amazing and perplexing. How could they ever have devised such wild and childish efforts—all in the wrong direction?
If that outer life were the real one how could any intelligent being think it worth while to live? How could any thinking man hold up his head and walk along the street with dignity if that was what he believed? Was a man satisfied with it worth keeping alive at all? What bigger scheme could ever use him? The direction of modern life today was diametrically away from happiness and truth.
Peace was the word he knew, peace and a singing joy.
* * * * *
He played with the Earth's great dawn and raced along these mountains through her mind. Of course> the hills could dance and sing and clap their hands. He saw it clear. How could it be otherwise? They were expressions of her giant moods—what in himself were thoughts—phases of her ample, surging Consciousness….
He passed with the sunlight down the laughing valleys, spread with the morning wind above the woods, shone on the snowy peaks, and leaped with rushing laughter among the crystal streams. These were his swift and darting signs of joy, words of his singing as it were. His main and central being swung with the pulse of the Earth, too great for any telling.
He read the book of Nature all about him, yes, but read it singing. He understood how this patient Mother hungered for her myriad lost children, how in the passion of her summers she longed to bless them, to wake their high yearnings with the sweetness of her springs, and to whisper through her autumns how she prayed for their return…!
Instinctively he read the giant Page before him. For "every form in nature is a symbol of an idea and represents a sign or letter. A succession of such symbols forms a language; and he who is a true child of nature may understand this language and know the character of everything. His mind, becomes a mirror wherein the attributes of natural things are reflected and enter the field of his consciousness…. For man himself is but a thought pervading the ocean of mind."
Whether or not lie remembered these stammering yet pregnant words from the outer world now left behind, the truth they shadowed forth rose up and took him … and so he flowed across the mountains like a thing of wind and cloud, and so at length came up with the stragglers of that mighty herd of Urwelt life. He joined them in a river-bed of those ancient valleys. They welcomed him and took him to themselves.
* * * * *