As a meteor glides silent for a moment among the fixed stars and is gone—so among the words of this book glides eluding that other Word which reveals their significance;

Wonderful, eternal—when these words perish and fall apart from each other that word shall not perish but return thither whence it sprang.

To see the old sight—and to dream the old dream—the theatre is crowded.

The stout matron comes from behind the bar, the clerk slips down from his half-furnished fireless garret, the lady and gentleman lounge in from their five-course dinner:

The joiner’s apprentice slips off his apron and hurries over his tea and bread and butter; the dressmaker’s girl and the private soldier and the blasé from the club are all there—

Amid the blaze of light and color, between the music and the jokes, the strange haunting clinging dream is there.

The young buck with coat-sleeves turned up with fur cannot but wait for it outside the stage door;

The improver goes back next morning to her work, but she cannot rightly see the box-plaits (as she runs them previous to putting them in the machine); when she hurries home through the streets at evening she keeps looking to see if what she caught sight of is there.

* * * * *

On the pavement in the flare of gas the motley crowd goes by; the policeman stands backed against the gin-shop at the corner, marshaling the buses or quietly gossiping with cronies.

Off the curb, by her tray of cork and felt socks, weary-eyed, wrapping her thin shawl close, the elderly woman stands, or tramps to and fro to keep her feet warm.

Under the great roof in the dockyard slip, amid incessant din, deep in the bowels of the iron ship, the riveters hammer day by day their red-hot iron rivets.

Brown-backed partridges fly across the ploughed land; far above them motionless the quick-eyed hawk discerns their moving shadows.

White-tunicked Albanian soldiers march across the hills above the beautiful city and lake of Janina.

Down beside a rippling stream over-shadowed by trees, at midnight the rapt watcher stands motionless. The stars in slow procession glide westward. They pass behind the dark tree-boles and emerge again; but he moves not—his thoughts move not.

Absorbed, the world circles round him, the shackles of existence fall off, he passes into supreme joy and mastery.

Lo! the rippling stream and the stars and the naked tree-branches deliver themselves up to him. They come close; they are his body, and his spirit is rapt among them: without thought he hears what they and all things would say.