His pleasure in the fact of being alive, in the colours of morning and evening, in the touch of cool waters, in the whispering of wind among the firs, were quickened to an inconceivable degree; it was impossible to want anything except the privilege of enjoying this amazing thrill of existence. And with it there had returned to him the need of expressing himself in writing; a new aspect of the world had been revealed to him, and without struggle, but with an even-flowing pen he set himself to record it, in veiled phrases and descriptions through which, as in chinks of light seen at the edges of drawn blinds, there came hints and suggestions of the fresh world that had dawned on him. Where before it was the clear stainlessness of the sea, the purifying breath of great winds that had been his theme, now instead the satyr crouched in the bushes, the snake lay coiled in the heather. It was from the slime and mud and from among blind crawling things that the water-lily sprang, and where before the enchantment of life moved him, he felt now only the call of putrefaction and decay. The lethal side of the created world had become exquisite in his eyes, and the beauty of it was derived from its everlasting corruption, not from the eternal upspringing of life. Lust, not love, was the force that kept it young, and renewed it so that the harvest of its decay should never ceased to be reaped. His mind had become a mirror that distorted into grotesque and evil shapes every image of beauty that was reflected in it, and rejoiced in them; it seemed to him that all nature, as well as all human motive, was based upon this exquisite secret that he had discovered. But it would never do to state it with what he considered the bald realism of those ludicrous sea-pieces he had written at Silorno; he must wrap his message up in a sort of mystic subtlety so that only those who had implanted in them the true instinct should be able to fill their souls with the perfume of his flowers. Others might guess and wonder and be puzzled, and perhaps see so far as to put down his book with disgust that was still half incredulous; but only the initiated would be able to grasp wholly the message that lurked in his hints and allusions. His style, underneath this new inspiration, had developed into an instrument of marvellous beauty, and often, when he had written a page or two, he would read it out aloud to himself, in wonder at that exquisite diction, and all the time he felt that he was reading aloud to Martin, and that Martin had dictated to him.