ne, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
desirable thing.

That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
of the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
coming and going.

I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
almost be called a kind of aesthetics. They are aesthetics indeed of
renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet