or description, or from what another has written.  A relation to the thing in itself alone is our warrant, and this means we must set aside our intellectual self-sufficiency and await guidance.  It will surely come to those who wait in trust, a glow, a heat in the heart announcing the awakening of the Fire.  And, as it blows with its mystic breath into the brain, there is a hurtling of visions, a brilliance of lights, a sound as of great waters vibrant and musical in their flowing, and murmurs from a single yet multitudinous being.  In such a mood, when the far becomes near, the strange familiar, and the infinite possible, he wrote from whose words we get the inspiration: 

“To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.”

Such a faith and such an unrest be ours:  faith which is mistrust of the visible; unrest which is full of a hidden surety and radiance.  We, when we fall into pleasant places, rest and dream our strength away.  Before every enterprise and adventure of the soul we calculate in fear our power to do.  But remember, “Oh, disciple, in thy work for thy brother thou has many allies; in the winds, in the air, in all the voices of the silent shore.”  These are the far-wandered powers of our own nature and they turn again home at our need.  We came out of the Great Mother-Life for the purposes of soul.  Are her darlings forgotten where they darkly wander and strive?  Never.  Are not the lives of all her heroes proof?  Though they seem to stand alone the eternal Mother keeps watch on them, and voices far away and unknown to them before arise in passionate defence, and hearts beat warm to help them.  Aye, if we could look within we would see vast nature stirred on their behalf, and institutions shaken, until the truth they fight for triumphs, and they pass, and a wake of glory ever widening behind them trails down the ocean of the years.

Thus the warrior within us works, or, if we choose to phrase it so, it is the action of the spiritual will.  Shall we not, then, trust in it and face the unknown defiant and fearless of its dangers.  Though we seem to go alone to the high, the lonely, the pure, we need not despair.  Let no one bring to this task the mood of the martyr or of one who thinks he sacrifices something.  Yet let all who will come.  Let them enter the path, “Yes, and hope,” facing all things in life and death with a mood at once gay and reverent, as beseems those who are immortal—­who are children today, but whose hands tomorrow may grasp the sceptre, sitting down with the Gods as equal and companions.

—­August 1895

Content

Who are exiles? as for me
        Where beneath the diamond dome
Lies the light on hill or tree
        There my palace is and home.