seemed, of a planet I had not observed before.  I could not then observe closer, and coming again on another occasion it had disappeared.  After the lapse of many months I saw it once more, brilliant with fiery beauty—­its motion was slow, rotating around some invisible centre.  I pondered over it, and seemed to know that the invisible centre was its primordial spiritual state, from which it emerged a little while and into which it then withdrew.  Short was its day; its shining faded into a glimmer, and then into darkness in a few months.  I learned its time and cycles; I made preparations and determined to await its coming.

The Birth of a Planet

At first silence and then an inner music, and then the sounds of song throughout the vastness of its orbit grew as many in number as there were stars at gaze.  Avenues and vistas of sound!  They reeled to and fro.  They poured from a universal stillness quick with unheard things.  They rushed forth and broke into a myriad voices gay with childhood.  From age and the eternal they rushed forth into youth.  They filled the void with reveling and exultation.  In rebellion they then returned and entered the dreadful Fountain.  Again they came forth, and the sounds faded into whispers; they rejoiced once again, and again died into silence.

And now all around glowed a vast twilight; it filled the cradle of the planet with colourless fire.  I felt a rippling motion which impelled me away from the centre to the circumference.  At that centre a still flame began to lighten; a new change took place, and space began to curdle, a milky and nebulous substance rocked to and fro.  At every motion the pulsation of its rhythm carried it farther and farther away from the centre, it grew darker, and a great purple shadow covered it so that I could see it no longer.  I was now on the outer verge, where the twilight still continued to encircle the planet with zones of clear transparent light.

As night after night I rose up to visit it they grew many-coloured and brighter.  I saw the imagination of nature visibly at work.  I wandered through shadowy immaterial forests, a titanic vegetation built up of light and colour; I saw it growing denser, hung with festoons and trailers of fire, and spotted with the light of myriad flowers such as earth never knew.  Coincident with the appearance of these things I felt within myself, as if in harmonious movement, a sense of joyousness, an increase of self-consciousness; I felt full of gladness, youth, and the mystery of the new.  I felt that greater powers were about to appear, those who had thrown outwards this world and erected it as a place in space.