I feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm--Rhythm and ecstasy! I have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody off from seeing God. Pure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty rag-picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive. Of other persons I don’t judge. But me I know to be murderously un-pure of heart. If I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple mechanical motive in the act-- But I can’t. There’s a romantic impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash or the door-key. There’s a pervasive delicate infusion of impure motive all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one curse in the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long ago. It is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart. And it is not God’s. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out that it is not God’s fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and each blue-green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can reach that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that God is worth seeing. And if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular power of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it: thinking only that I want to get the door open: then back of _that_ door I know I shall see God! It is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on the Mount. _A prayer-feeling_ To-day So it is finished: and I have oddly Failed. I have slyly Succeeded and oddly Failed in equal degree. I have Failed because I am too cowardly and too weak and too dishonest to write certain bruised and self-accusing places in my Soul and in my Heart and in my Mind which rightly come in the scope of this: there are the Stern and Delicate Voices one closes one’s ears against: there are the starry grimy Actualities one drops from one’s hands: there are the Thoughts one Does Not Think. Yet and yet: they too are in it, hanging cobweb-ish on my wordings and colons.