prophet meant was rather to show that we must
not be deceived by cares and anxieties and daily business; but that
behind the little simmering of the world was a tumult of vast forces,
voices crying and answering, thunder, fire, infinite music. It is all
a command to recognise unseen greatness, to take every least
experience we can, and crush from it all its savour; not to be afraid
of the great emotions of the world, love and sorrow and loss; but only
to be afraid of what is petty and sordid and mean. And then perhaps,
as in that other vision, we may ascend once into a mountain, and there
in weariness and drowsiness, dumbly bewildered by the night and the
cold and the discomforts of the unkindly air, life may be for a moment
transfigured into a radiant figure, still familiar though so
glorified; and we may see it for once touch hands and exchange words
with old and wise spirits; and all this not only to excite us and
bewilder us, but so that by the drawing of the veil aside, we may see
for a moment that there is some high and splendid secret, some
celestial business proceeding with solemn patience and strange
momentousness, a rite which if we cannot share, we may at least know
is there, and waiting for us, the moment that we are strong enough to
take our part!

XVI

THOUGHT

A friend of mine had once a strange dream; he seemed to himself to be
walking in a day of high summer on a grassy moorland leading up to
some fantastically piled granite crags. He made his way slowly
thither; it was terribly hot there among the sun-warmed rocks, and he
found a little natural cave, among the great boulders, fringed with
fern. There he sate for a long time while the sun passed over, and a
little breeze came wandering up the moor. Opposite him as he sate was
the face of a great pile of rocks, and while his eye dwelt upon it it
suddenly began to wink and glisten with little moving points, dots so
minute that he could hardly distinguish them. Suddenly, as if at a
signal, the little points dropped from the rock, and the whole surface
seemed alive with gossamer threads, as if a silken, silvery curtain
had been let down; presently the little dots reached the grass and
began to crawl over it; and then he saw that each of them was attached
to one of the fine threads; and he thought that they were a colony of
minute spiders, living on the face of the rocks. He got up to see this
wonder close at hand, but the moment he moved, the w