It is difficult to put into intelligible, convincing words the irresistible character of this Nature-spell that invades heart and brain like a drenching sea, and produces a sense of rapture, of ecstasy, compared to which the highest conceivable worldly joy becomes merely insipid.... Heat from this magical source was always more or less present in my mind from a very early age, though, of course, no attempt to analyse or explain it was then possible; but, in bitter years to come, the joy and comfort Nature gave became a real and only solace. When possession was at its full height, the ordinary world, and my particular little troubles with it, fell away like so much dust; the whole fabric of men and women, commerce and politics, even the destinies of nations, became a passing show of shadows, while the visible and tangible world showed itself as but a temporary and limited representation of a real world elsewhere whose threshold I had for a moment touched. Others, of course, have known similar experiences, but, being better equipped, have understood how to correlate them to ordinary life. Richard Jefferies explained them. Whitman tasted expansion of consciousness in many ways; Fechner made a grandiose system of them; Edward Carpenter deliberately welcomed them; Jacob Boehme, Plotinus, and many others have tried to fix their nature and essence in terms, respectively, of religion and philosophy; and William James has reviewed them with an insight as though he had had experienced them himself. Whatever their value, they remain authentic, the sense of oneness of life their common denominator, a conviction of consciousness pervading all forms everywhere their inseparable characteristic. If Kentish gardens saw the birth of this delight, the Black Forest offered further opportunities for its enjoyment, and a year in a village of the Swiss Jura Mountains to learn French--I often wandered all night in the big pine forests without my tutor, a bee-keeping pasteur, at Bôle, near Neuchâtel, discovering my absence--intensified it. Without it something starved in me. It was a persistent craving, often a wasting _nostalgia_, that cried for satisfaction as the whole body cries for covering when cold, and Nature provided a companionship, a joy, a bliss, that no human intercourse has ever approached, much less equalled. It remains the keenest, deepest sensation of its kind I have known....