ar us from eternal beauty. From the Wise One
I learned that the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in
secret. Those who are voiceless today, tomorrow shall be eloquent, and
the earth shall hear them and her children salute them. Of these three
truths the hardest to learn is the silent will. Let us seek for the
highest truth.

1894

THE STORY OF A STAR

The emotions that haunted me in that little cathedral town would be most
difficult to describe. After the hurry, rattle, and fever of the city,
the rare weeks spent here were infinitely peaceful. They were full of
a quaint sense of childhood, with sometimes a deeper chord touched--the
giant and spiritual things childhood has dreams of. The little room I
slept in had opposite its window the great gray cathedral wall; it was
only in the evening that the sunlight crept round it and appeared in
the room strained through the faded green blind. It must have been this
silvery quietness of color which in some subtle way affected me with the
feeling of a continual Sabbath; and this was strengthened by the bells
chiming hour after hour. The pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by
the flying notes colored the intervals with faint and delicate memories.
They haunted my dreams, and I heard with unutterable longing the dreamy
chimes pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic memory,
until the peace they tolled became almost a nightmare, and I longed for
utter oblivion or forgetfulness of their reverberations.

More remarkable were the strange lapses into other worlds and times.
Almost as frequent as the changing of the bells were the changes from
state to state. I realized what is meant by the Indian philosophy of
Maya. Truly my days were full of Mayas, and my work-a-day city life was
no more real to me than one of those bright, brief glimpses of things
long past. I talk of the past, and yet these moments taught me how false
our ideas of time are. In the Ever-living yesterday, today, and tomorrow
are words of no meaning. I know I fell into what we call the past and
the things I counted as dead for ever were the things I had yet to
endure. Out of the old age of earth I stepped into its childhood, and
received once more the primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty.
But these things are too vast and vague to speak of, the words we use
today cannot tell their story. Nearer to our time is the legend that
follows.

I was, I thought, one of the Magi