For the whisper came
to me, beyond all telling sure. Beauty had touched me, Wisdom come to birth; and Love, whispering
through the silence those marvellous words that sum up all spiritual
experience, proved it to me:

"Be still--and know...."

I found myself moving slowly across the lawn again towards the house. I
presently heard the wind mousing softly in the limes. The air was fresh
and cool. The first stars were out. I saw the laburnum drooping, as
though thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards among
the branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of the
early roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow of
lighted lamps...  and I became suddenly, in a very intimate sense,
"aware" of the garden. The Presence that walked beside me moved abruptly
closer. This Presence and the garden seemed, as in some divine
mysterious way, inseparable. There was a stirring of the dimmest and most primitive associations
possible. Memory plunged back among ancestral, even racial, shadows. I
recalled the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world,
when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, and
companioning his earliest innocence, walked with him in that happier
state those childlike poets called--a garden. That childhood of the
world seemed very near. I found again the conditions of innocence and pristine wonder--of
simplicity. There was a garden in my heart, and some one walked with me
therein. For Life in its simplest form--of breathing leaves and growing
flowers, of trees and plants and shrubs--glowed all about me in the
darkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strong
stems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon every
side, brimming with beauty and stillness did not seek to advertise. And
of this simplest form of life--the vegetable kingdom--I became vividly
aware, prodigal, mysterious, yet purposive. The outer garden merged with
the inner, and the Presence walked in both of them.... I was led backwards, far down into my own being. I reached the earliest,
simplest functions by which I myself had come to be, the state where the
frontier lies between that which is dead and that which is alive. Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, that
frontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power of
converting the mineral or the chemical into the living organism by
absorption; and here, among the leaves and roots and flowers, that power
was sweetly, irresistibly, at work. It seemed I reached that frontier, and I passed it. Beauty came through
the most primitive aspect of my being. And so I would tell you, you alone of all the world, that the Presence
walking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that I
was aware of it in what seemed my earliest and most innocent state of
soul. Beside me, in that old-world garden, walked the Cause of all things. The
Beauty that in you was truth, in Marion tenderness, was harvested: and
somebody was pleased. XI

ALL this I have told to you because we have known together the closest
intimacy possible to human beings--we have shared beauty. They said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you were
dead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favourite
southwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into
space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now
in my long letter. It is enough. I know. There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other
realized at the time.... In the body there was promise. There is now
accomplishment. It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the
heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You
will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all
out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill
your empty room--on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result
from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt,
congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of
the matter. I am evidently not "an artist"--that at any rate I
gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about
something they had never "lived." I could almost believe that the
writers of these subtle analyses have never themselves felt
beauty--the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They have
known, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never this
light within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness and
makes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation,
and that eternity is now. Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the
proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in
the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I
came back hungrily to my simple starting-point--that beauty moved me. It opened my heart to one of its many aspects--truth, wisdom, joy,
and love--and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered! I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my
judgment:  coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all. Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared
or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these. The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly
explanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I felt
it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything
be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and
to the second a tangible man or woman--and let those who have the
time analyse both cravings at their leisure. For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common
with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to
miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no
shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I
speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of
the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I
think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing
this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is
unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously,
then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of
the entire being into light and knowledge. The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes
unheralded--a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store
that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can
be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax
is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is
unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the
phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a
lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is
not in time. It is eternity.