In the distance lay Rome.  He could see St. Peter’s dome.  But around streamed the ocean of grass and the ocean of air.  Lifted from the one, bathed in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome.  There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among time-cleansed bones and vestiges.  Rome and its Campagna were like Sargasso Seas and held the hulks of what had been great galleons.  The air swam above endless grass, endless minute flowers.  In long perspective traveled the arches of an Aqueduct.

He lay in the shadow of a broken tomb.  It was midspring.  The bland stillness of this world was grateful to him, after long inner storm.  He lay motionless, not far from the skirts of Contemplation.

The long line of the Aqueduct, arch after arch, succession fixed, sequence which the gaze made unitary, toled on his thought.  He was regarding span after span of imagery held together, a very wide and deep landscape of numerous sequences, more planes than one.  He was seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around the organ the luminous mist of the organism.  He passed calmly from one great landscape to another.

Rome.  To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow.  The “to-morrow” put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless breathing.  He saw Rome the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast animal life of her, the vast passional, the mental clutch and hammer-blow.  The spiritual Rome?  He sought it—­it must be there.  At last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....  Rome.

If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and floating.  He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to.  Like and like, and synthesis of syntheses!  Images, finding that of which they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line, their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of riddles never meant to be answered....  He had a great fund of images, material so full that it must begin to build higher.  Building higher meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.

He lay still among the grasses, and it was as though he lay also amid the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living.  Now and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and space, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them.  The lightning went—­but always left something transforming.  And then for three years all gleams stopped, a leaden wall that they could not pierce rearing itself.