I lie abed in illness, and experience strange extensions of spirit. I am close to those afar off, and the present and near at hand are discounted. I spend nights of pain and loneliness.

I dream of the beautiful life. I go down to the sea with fisher folk, and spend chill nights on the great deep under the stars; the sun rises on faces round me of freedom and experience. I see everywhere the old simple occupations—the making and mending of nets, the growing of flax and hemp, the tending of gardens, cattle—the old sweet excuses for existence, their meaning now partly understood—the faith that grows in the open air and out of all honest work till it surrounds and redeems the soul.

The blacksmith blows up his fire; he listens for the sound of the great heat. He taps the glowing iron in advance of the blows of the striker, and turns it deftly with the tongs.

The budder of roses bends among the low bushes; with a quick motion he flirts out the wood and binds the bud on the wild stock. The wire-weaver stands at his loom, working the treadles with his foot and throwing the shuttle with alternate hand.

The old coach-body maker stands at his bench, grey-haired, worn, thoughtful—the young apprentice comes down whistling from the trimming shop to ask him a question.

The sunlight streams in broad shafts through the chinks of the blinds into the carpenter’s shop; with grizzled beard and hair, and something of a stoop in his shoulders, the governor stands penciling out a fresh job; a tall young fellow sits astride of a door-style, cutting a mortise, and a dab of light on the floor sends a reflection up in his arch-humored face.

The bathers in the late twilight, almost dark, advance naked under the trees by the waterside, five or six together, superb, unashamed, scarcely touching the ground.

The budding pens of love scorch all over me—my skin is too tight, I am ready to burst through it—a flaming girdle is round my middle. Eyes, hair, lips, hands, waist, thighs—O naked mad tremors; in the dark feeding pasturing flames!

* * * * *

O soul, spreading, spreading—impalpable sunlight behind the sunlight!

The tall thin grey-bearded man I meet daily in the street—with lined brow, silent, full of experience;

The stout matron in the greengrocer’s shop, loquacious, clear-eyed, with clear indubitable voice;

The thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with the strap round his waist;

The young printer (but he has a wife and family at home) with large dreamy projecting eyes, going absent, miles away, over his work—thinking of Swedenborg and the dance of atoms and angels;

The young woman at the refreshment bar, her thick light-colored hair, her well-formed features, and the bored look in her eyes as she returns the chaff of the carefully-dressed young man across the counter;

The military-looking official at the door of the hotel—the despondency of drink which he conceals beneath his loud-voiced smart exterior;

The ragged boy with rare intense eyes not to be misunderstood—in the midst of much dirt and ignorance the soul through suffering enfranchised, exhaled—here too shining like the sunlight, redeeming justifying all it lights on;

The slut of a girl who has become a mother, the ready doubt among her neighbors who was the father; the stupid loving way in which she crams the child to her breast—sitting on a stone by the fire-side utterly oblivious of opinion;

The good-natured fair-haired Titan at work in the fields; the little woman with large dark eyes who is so clever and managing among the poor, and with their children;

The thin close-lipped friz-haired commercial traveler, unwearied, walking long distances to save railway or coach fare, well posted in all local information for fifty miles round;

His wife, so comfortable and fore-thoughtful at home, so evil-tongued abroad, and the bevy of red-haired red-cheeked girls, well drilled in scrubbing and cooking, and not without a veneer of accomplishments;

The railway lamp-foreman, tall, strong, fleet of foot, with gentle voice—lover of the fields and flowers, going long walks Sundays or late evenings by moonlight—sending the balance of his earnings to support his aged father and mother;

The bright sunny girl-child with long beautiful hair (envied of the other children) and poignant blossoming lips and eyes;

The girl in the tobacconist’s shop, her drooping lashes, her taper fingers, and provocative inimitable composure—and all the time her mother is incurably dying;

The hunch-backed cobbler, young, thwarted, thinking incessantly of Jesus—praying night and day for the gift of preaching;

The drunken father reeling home in the rain across country—he has more than a mile to go—singing, cursing, tumbling hands and knees in the mire; his son following unbeknown at a little distance (he had been watching a long time for his father outside the beershop); the late moon rising on the strange scene, the hiccuped oaths of the old man through the silence of the night.