I have made my lair in many places since I first kept house with Nature. I have couched in heather by the pines of hills far above the Sussex Weald; I have lain in dry furrows or on the margin of a copse, or in the parks of the children of fortune, for whose welfare, in gratitude for their unconscious hospitality, I shall ever pray. But of all wild resting-places I have known, the openest are the most delightful. To see the whole sweep of the stars; to lie on the shorn ground free of all that overshadows or encompasses or confines; to breathe in the great gulf of air; to stretch unhindered limbs--this is an initiation into a new life, a pleasant memory in the long glooms of winter. Let nothing come between you and the stars, that they may look well upon your face, and haply repenting of some ancient unkindliness, draw you at this rebirth a new horoscope of blessing and fair fortune. And if slumber tarries when you lie in an open spot, you may consciously ride the great globe through space, and like the shepherd watching by his flock in the clear night while star rises after star, grow aware of the great earth rolling to the east beneath you. In these still hours of night or early dawn there steals upon the charmed mind an Orphic sense of worship and inexplicable joy. For here on bare uplands and wooded hills, where the starlight rains down through the silence, or the day, welling up over the rim of the downs, glides fresh from the lips of ocean, a calm river of light, here is the place of Dionysus, of him born from fire and dew, Zagreus the soul of clean souls and wild lives, his heart a-quiver with vague sadness drawn from all the worlds, Eleutherios, loosener of heart and lip, the regenerator, the absolver, the eternally misunderstood, whose true followers are priests of impassioned pure life, whose wine is not juice of grapes but the clear air ambient upon the hills. Here when sleep is shamed away by expectant awe, the whole being grows one with all-environing life; personality glides into the stream of cosmic existence, lost and found a thousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim divine feelings beyond the power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is religion; it is a feast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing ritual without victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone, man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high and humble, transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of all existences within the universe is made real and significant to the initiate mind. For in the day fences are about us, roofs and towers impend above our heads, we are cribbed in streets and markets, the din of rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills our ears. Or if we withdraw into some still chamber, yet the walls built by hired hands offend, and the doorposts of sapless timber; no high influence can penetrate to us save through the close court of memory, and compared with the breezy starlit