, as truly as a new and delightful
sensitiveness to a spiritual world marked the re-birth of Bunyan. The
whole secret of re-birth lies in the recovery of lost affinities.

I do not recollect any particular crisis such as Thoreau describes, but
I can trace the process in myself. I took no pains to cast the slough
of cities; I registered no vows and consulted no teachers; it seemed
that the thing was quietly done for me by the Higher Powers. I had no
part in the matter except to be docile. Nature took me in hand, as
sleep takes in hand the sick child; the only thing asked of me was my
submission. The result soon appeared in the altered scale of my
perceptions. I became indifferent to newspapers, to the doings and
performances of public personages, to the rise and fall of literary
reputations, and to a great many books which once interested me. I saw
that a considerable number of those whom I had counted public teachers
were no better than persons who talked in their sleep. They knew
nothing of the elemental life of man, and were unfitted to pronounce
verdicts upon his destiny. Novelists particularly offended me by their
gross ignorance of life. The pictures of life they drew were as untrue
as a description of a street-fight would be if written by a perfumed
odalisque who had never crossed the threshold of a harem. The ancient
elemental life of man, spent in storm and sunshine, under wide skies,
they had not so much as looked at, and their voluminous chatter about
man and his doings had as little relation to life as the philosophy
that is enunciated in a monkey-house. Opera-bouffe performed upon
Helvellyn would be a sorry spectacle; what was all this bedizened rout
of people playing before the footlights of cities, but a vain burlesque
at which Nature laughed? And as my sense of the importance of this
kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama
conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are
the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour of
Eternity, through neighbourship with things that are themselves
eternal. I tasted the pleasure of enlarged existence, which had become
possible through enlarged affinities. I had eaten of the Tree of Life,
which grows wherever there is a Garden brought to beauty by the sweat
of man's brow, and I had the knowledge of good and evil.

One form of neighbourship which brought me perpetual delight was--if I