"He was two years old when—as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence—he asked me for the Moon.
"Unwisely I protested:—
"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.'
"He answered:—
"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.'
" ... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.
"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,—upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,—and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom....
"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,—do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,—longings that if realised could only work us woe,—such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?
"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,—even for more than the Sun, and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."
He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings, supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and become "one" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with the rapture of wind and sea—was his. The fact of his own existence was so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.