atch the evanescent
inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small
things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his
window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising
above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life.

In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully,
almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject
of human desire and attainment.

"He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual
recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.

"Unwisely I protested:--

"'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach
it.'

"He answered:--

"'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock
it down.'

"... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately
truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.

"This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that
brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and
fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some
inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to
freedom....

"Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish
could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children
of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings
that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the
continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which
once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often
subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?

"No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the
child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us
to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun,
and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven."

He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife
tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became
more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings,
supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He
had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now
the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and
become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with
the rapture of wind