Standing, one summer's morning, in a recess on London Bridge, he looks
out on the sunshine "burning on steadfast," "lighting the great heaven;
gleaming on my finger-nail."
"I was intensely conscious of it," he writes, "I felt it; I felt
the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into
the depths of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the
sky, the limitless space, I felt too in the midst of eternity then,
in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and the
greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I saw my
soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real
than the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that
moment."[23]
When he reaches this state, outer things drop away,[24] and he seems to
become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe. He partakes,
momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through
nature. The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed
like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me.
Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible
universe filled me.
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