But I cry when the wolf is tearing At the core of my heart as now: When I was the man to be tortured, Why should the woman be _thou?_ I am not so ready to sink from the lofty in to the abject now. If at times I yet feel that the whole creation is groaning and travailing, I know what it is for--its redemption from the dominion of its own death into that sole liberty which comes only of being filled and eternally possessed by God himself, its source and its life. And now I found also that my heart began to be moved with a compassion towards my fellows such as I had never before experienced. I shall best convey what I mean by transcribing another little poem I wrote about the same time. Once I sat on a crimson throne, And I held the world in fee; Below me I heard my brothers moan, And I bent me down to see;-- Lovingly bent and looked on them, But _I_ had no inward pain; I sat in the heart of my ruby gem, Like a rainbow without the rain. My throne is vanished; helpless I lie At the foot of its broken stair; And the sorrows of all humanity Through my heart make a thoroughfare. Let such things rest for a while: I have now to relate another incident--strange enough, but by no means solitary in the records of human experience. My reader will probably think that of dreams and visions there has already been more than enough: but perhaps she will kindly remember that at this time I had no outer life at all. Whatever bore to me the look of existence was within me. All my days the tendency had been to an undue predominance of thought over action, and now that the springs of action were for a time dried up, what wonder was it if thought, lording it alone, should assume a reality beyond its right? Hence the life of the day was prolonged into the night; nor was there other than a small difference in their conditions, beyond the fact that the contrast of outer things was removed in sleep; whence the shapes which the waking thought had assumed had space and opportunity, as it were, to thicken before the mental eye until they became dreams and visions. But concerning what I am about to relate I shall offer no theory. Such mere operation of my own thoughts may be sufficient to account for it: I would only ask--does any one know what the _mere_ operation of his own thoughts signifies? I cannot isolate myself, especially in those moments when the individual will is less awake, from the ocean of life and thought which not only surrounds me, but on which I am in a sense one of the floating bubbles.