lation was. I
have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and
then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur."[27]

[27] Letters of Lowell, i. 75.

{66} Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript
collection:--

"I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where
my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a
rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was
deep calling unto deep--the deep that my own struggle had opened up
within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond
the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty
of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not
seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The
ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but
an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossible fully to
describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great
orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling
harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his
soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion.
The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn
silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt
because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was
there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the
less real of the two.

"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me.
I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round
about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of
the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God,
and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden
change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception,
had, as it were burst into flower. There was no destruction of the
old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion
that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence has been able to
shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have
never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his
existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision in the memory of that
supreme experience, and in the conv