creature, with
one last burst of passionate happiness, flew away into the darkness.
And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur of my
blood... an exquisite joy ran through me, making me quiver with
expectancy from head to foot....

And it was then suddenly I became aware that the long-closed door at
last was open, the still chamber occupied. Some one who was pleased,
stretching a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me within
that chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that was
now a veil, and now a mist, and now a shining blaze of light...
passed into a remote and inner stillness where that direct communion
which is wordless can alone take place.

It was, I verily believe, a stillness of the spirit. At the centre of
the tempest, of the whirlpool, of the heart's commotion, there is
peace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hid
with beauty very far away, and yet so near that it is enclosed in
every hope, in every yearning, and in every tear. For the whisper came
to me, beyond all telling sure.

Beauty had touched me, Wisdom come to birth; and Love, whispering
through the silence those marvellous words that sum up all spiritual
experience, proved it to me:

"Be still--and know...."

I found myself moving slowly across the lawn again towards the house. I
presently heard the wind mousing softly in the limes. The air was fresh
and cool. The first stars were out. I saw the laburnum drooping, as
though thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards among
the branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of the
early roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow of
lighted lamps... and I became suddenly, in a very intimate sense,
"aware" of the garden. The Presence that walked beside me moved abruptly
closer. This Presence and the garden seemed, as in some divine
mysterious way, inseparable.

There was a stirring of the dimmest and most primitive associations
possible. Memory plunged back among ancestral, even racial, shadows. I
recalled the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world,
when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, and
companioning his earliest innocence, walked with him in that happier
state those childlike poets called--a garden. That childhood of the
world seemed very near.

I found again the conditions of innocence and pristine wonder--of
simplicity. There was a garden