I could easily have thought them to be departed spirits who had left this world unsatisfied, and so keep coming back to it again and again in the guise of bees, paying me an inquiring visit in passing. But I think nothing of the kind. I am sure they are real bees, otherwise known, in Sanskrit, as honey-suckers, or on still rarer occasions as double-proboscideans. SHELIDAH, _16th (Phalgun) February_ 1895. We have to tread every single moment of the way as we go on living our life, but when taken as a whole it is such a very small thing, two hours uninterrupted thought can hold all of it. After thirty years of strenuous living Shelley could only supply material for two volumes of biography, of which, moreover, a considerable space is taken up by Dowden's chatter. The thirty years of my life would not fill even one volume. What a to-do there is over this tiny bit of life! To think of the quantity of land and trade and commerce which go to furnish its commissariat alone, the amount of space occupied by each individual throughout the world, though one little chair is large enough to hold the whole of him! Yet, after all is over and done, there remains only material for two hours' thought, some pages of writing! What a negligible fraction of my few pages would this one lazy day of mine occupy! But then, will not this peaceful day, on the desolate sands by the placid river, leave nevertheless a distinct little gold mark even upon the scroll of my eternal past and eternal future? SHELIDAH, _28th February_ 1895. I have got an anonymous letter to-day which begins: To give up one's self at the feet of another, is the truest of all gifts. The writer has never seen me, but knows me from my writings, and goes on to say: However petty or distant, the Sun[1]-worshipper gets a share of the Sun's rays. You are the world's poet, yet to me it seems you are my own poet! [Footnote 1: Rabi, the author's name, means the Sun.] and more in the same strain. Man is so anxious to bestow his love on some object, that he ends by falling in love with his own Ideal. But why should we suppose the idea to be less true than the reality? We can never know for certain the truth of the substance underlying what we get through the senses. Why should the doubt be greater in the case of the entity behind the ideas which are the creation of mind? The mother realises in her child the great Idea, which is in every child, the ineffableness of which, however, is not revealed to any one else. Are we to say that what draws forth the mother's very life and soul is illusory, but what fails to draw the rest of us to the same extent is the real truth?