“‘I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part in us; and that it is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence, which is the life and radical heat of spirits.... This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwell in the body of the sun.’ “I dare not say I live. And yet the cows, the well-fed, quiet cows, in this fine soft weather stare enviously at me through the gate, though they know nothing of death, and I know it must come, and that even though often desired, when it comes it will be unwelcome----Yet they stare enviously at me, I am sure. “I have no courage. I can at least endure. I can use my freedom to become a slave again, and at least I know that I have lost nothing by my way of living. Yes, I can endure, and if after my death I am asked questions difficult to answer, I can ask one that is unanswerable which I have many times asked myself--often in London, but not here. Here I love my food and my work, my rest. My dreams are good. I am not unkindly spoken to; I make no enemies. “But yet I cannot look forward--there is nothing ahead--just as I cannot look back. My people have not built; they were not settled on the earth; they did nothing; they were oil or grit in a great machine; they took their food and shelter modestly and not ungratefully from powers above that were neither kind nor cruel. I hope I do no less; I wish I could do more. “Now again returns that old feeling of my childhood--I felt it when I had left my cousin--I have felt it suddenly not only in London, but on the top of the Downs and by the sea; the immense loneliness of the world, as if the next moment I might be outside of all visible things. You know how it is, on a still summer evening, so warm that the ploughman and his wife have not sent their children to bed, and they are playing, and their loud voices startle the thought of the woods; my feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay down my thoughts and desires and noises and stirrings and cease to trouble that great peace. It was, perhaps, of this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke: ‘My days are consumed like smoke.... I watch, and am as a sparrow alone on the housetop.’ The world is wrong, but the night is fine; the dew light and the moist air is full of the honeysuckle scent. I will smoke another pipe of your tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be alone before I sleep.”