, whether
you will or no, your one little ditty of no tone.

"Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music:
The hills and the sea and the earth dance:
The world of man dances in laughter and tears."

It seems a pity to remain in ignorance of this, to keep as it were a
plate-glass window between yourself and your fellow-dancers--
all those other thoughts of God, perpetually becoming, changing
and growing beside you--and commit yourself to the unsocial
attitude of the "cat that walks by itself."

Begin therefore at once. Gather yourself up, as the exercises of
recollection have taught you to do. Then--with attention no
longer frittered amongst the petty accidents and interests of your
personal life, but poised, tense, ready for the work you shall
demand of it--stretch out by a distinct act of loving will towards
one of the myriad manifestations of life that surround you: and
which, in an ordinary way, you hardly notice unless you happen
to need them. Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its image
towards you. Deliberate--more, impassioned--attentiveness, an
attentiveness which soon transcends all consciousness of
yourself, as separate from and attending to the thing seen; this is
the condition of success. As to the object of contemplation, it
matters little. From Alp to insect, anything will do, provided that
your attitude be right: for all things in this world towards which
you are stretching out are linked together, and one truly
apprehended will be the gateway to the rest.

Look with the eye of contemplation on the most dissipated tabby
of the streets, and you shall discern the celestial quality of life set
like an aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his strident
mew an echo of

"The deep enthusiastic joy,
The rapture of the hallelujah sent
From all that breathes and is."

The sooty tree up which he scrambles to escape your earnest gaze
is holy too. It contains for you the whole divine cycle of the
seasons; upon the plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to be
heard. But you must look at these things as you would look into
the eyes of a friend: ardently, selflessly, without considering his
reputation, his practical uses, his anatomical peculiarities, or the
vices which might emerge were he subjected to psycho-analysis.

Such a simple exercise, if entered upon with singleness of heart,
will soon repay you. By this quiet yet tense act of communion,