For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit to visit him but to seek to force it with violence. At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it, with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand, those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made up of the outpourings of spirit and memories. He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness loses itself too.