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THE

STORY OF MY HEART

RICHARD JKKKKRIES
After an Etching by W. STRANG, A. K.A.

THE STORY OF
MY HEART

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY

RICHARD JEFFERIES

AUTHOR OF "THE GAMEKEEPER AT HOME,'
''WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY,"

ETC.

WITH FRONTISPIECE

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

First printed September 1 883.

SILVER LIBRARY EDITION, June 1891.

Reprinted August 1891 ; July 1894 ; November 1896 ;

December 1898 ; October 1901 ; August 1904 ;

April 1906; August 1910.
POCKET EDITION, February 1907.
Reprinted April 1908 ; March 1911; October 1913 ;
1917 ; January 1920; February 1922.

College
Library

Al

PREFACE

THE title of this book is "The Story of my
Heart: my Autobiography," but it is not an
autobiography in the ordinary sense of the
word. In contains no history of the events
of Richard Jefferies' life. It is in no way
concerned with his birth or his marriage,
his actions or his fortunes. All that is
known of these has been told in "The
Eulogy of Richard Jefferies," by Walter
Besant. Sunt lachrymce rerum, as the an-
cient poet sang, and for those who have
tears to shed, what story is there more
sure to draw them than that tale of heroic
struggle against the agony of disease, of

836455

vi THE STORY OF MY HEART

genius unappreciated until it was too late,
of lofty aspirations and noble thought cut
short all too soon?

But none of these things are dwelt on in
"The Story of my Heart." Surely it is one of
the most singular books that man of genius
ever wrote. It is well described by its title.
It is an outpouring of Jefferies' innermost
soul. Like many another, he found himself
at odds with the world. He saw the beauty
of the land, the grandeur of the sea, the
interest of life — above all of human life —
but he was not satisfied. He longed for
more beauty, a fuller grandeur, a deeper
interest. This feeling completely mastered
him, and in "The Story of my Heart" he
poured out with what strength and what
skill he possessed the Intensity of his long-
ing. In republishing such a book it will not
be thought out of pkce to gather together
such few scraps of his writing as remain

PREFACE vii

which seem to throw light on its genesis
and its meaning.

On June 22, 1883, Jefferies wrote as
follows : —

SAVERNAKE, LORNA ROAD,
WEST BRIGHTON,

June 22, 1883.

DEAR SIR, — Thank you for the concession
— I will write the story-sketches and send
them. Mentally, the peasant paper is writ-
ten : I mean it is composed ; the MS. shall
reach you in good time. I have just finished
writing a book about which I have been
meditating seventeen years. I have called it
" The Story of my Heart : an Autobiography,"
and it really is an autobiography, an actual
record of thought. After so much thinking
it only makes one small volume — there are
no words wasted in it. I do not know
whether or no you would care to see the
MS.; if so, I will forward it — I do not

viii THE STORY OF MY HEART

mean for the Magazine. ... I wonder if
you would like my autobiographical con-
fessions.

I remain, faithfully yours,

RICHARD JEFFERIES.
C J. LONGMAN, Esg.

Jefferies was born in 1848; so that he
must have begun thinking about this book
when he was eighteen years old.

On June 27, 1883, he wrote: —

I have much pleasure in sending you the
MS. by letter post. My book is a real re-
cord— unsparing to myself as to all things
— absolutely and unflinchingly true.

The book was accepted, and published in
due course.

On November 3, 1883, he wrote: —

PREFACE ix

SAVERNAKE, LORNA ROAD,
WEST BRIGHTON,

November 3, 1883.

SIR, — Some time since I received a
circular asking for an analysis of " My Auto-
biography" for your "Notes on Books." I
have made several futile attempts to con-
centrate in a short note what I intended to
convey in the volume. I find it impossible
to do so. I have therefore endeavoured to
place myself as it were outside the book,
and to look at it as a stranger might. But
even to do this I have been obliged to make
two short quotations, which I hope is not
contrary to your rules. My description of
the book is very imperfect; still, it is the
best I could do, for, in fact, to describe it
properly would need another book. If any
of your Readers can write a clearer descrip-
tion for me I should be much obliged.
This explanation is necessary to account

x THE STORY OF MY HEART

for my delay in furnishing the required

note.

I remain, faithfully yours,

RICHARD JEFFERIES.
C. J. LONGMAN, Esq.

The analysis he drew up, which was printed
in "Notes on Books" of November 30, 1883,
was as follows : —

"This book is a confession. The Author
describes the successive stages of emotion
and thought through which he passed, till
he arrived at the conclusions which are set
forth in the latter part of the volume. /He
claims to have erased from his mind the
traditions and learning of the past ages,
and to stand face to face with nature and
with the unknojjwy/The general aim of the
work is to free thought from every trammel,
with the view of its entering upon another
and larger series of ideas than those which

PREFACE xi

have occupied the brain of man so many
centuries. He believes that there is a whole
world of ideas outside and beyond those
which now exercise us.

"The Author's ideas will be best illus-
trated by the following extracts : —

'"I remember a cameo of Augustus Caesar
— the head of the emperor is graven in deli-
cate lines, and shows the most exquisite
proportions. It is a balanced head, a head
adjusted to the calmest intellect. x£hat head,
when it was living contained a circle of ideas./

4_ ^^

the largest, the widest, the most profound
current in his time. All that philosophy
had taught, all that practice, experiment,
and empiricism had discovered, was familiar
to him. There was no knowledge in the
ancient world but what was accessible to the
Emperor of Rome. Now at this day there
are amongst us heads as finely proportioned
as that cut out in the cameo. Though

xii THE STORY OF MY HEART

these living men do not possess arbitrary
power, the advantages of arbitrary power —
as far as knowledge is concerned — are secured
to them by education, by the printing-press,
and the facilities of our era. It is reason-
able to imagine a head of our time filled
with the largest, the widest, the most pro-
found ideas current in the age. Augustus
Caesar, however great his intellect, could not
in that balanced head have possessed the
ideas familiar enough to the living head of
this day. As we have a circle of ideas un-
known to Augustus Caesar, so I argue there
are whole circles of ideas unknown to us.'

" For himself, for the individual, the Author
desires physical perfection — he despises ex-
ternal circumstances.

" « It is in myself that I desire increase,
profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and
soul. The surroundings, the clothes, the
dwelling, the social status, the circumstances

PREFACE xih

are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor
of the room be bare, let the furniture be
a plank table, the bed a mere pallet. Let
the house be plain and simple, but in the
midst of air and light. These are enough
— a cave would be enough; in a warmer
climate the open air would suffice. Let me
be furnished in myself with health, safety,
strength, the perfection of physical existence;
let my mind be furnished with highest
thoughts of soul-life. Let me be in myself
myself fully. The pageantry of power, the
still more foolish pageantry of wealth, the
senseless precedence of place; I fail words
to express my utter contempt for such
pleasure or such ambitions.'

"From all nature — from the universe —
he desires to take its energy, grandeur, and
beauty. He looks forward to the possibility
of ideal man, and adduces reasons for the
possibility of such ideal man living in en-

xiv THE STORY OF MY HEART

joyment of his faculties for a great length
of time. He is anxious that the culture of
the soul should be earnestly carried out, as
earnestly as the culture of the body was in
ancient Greece, as that of the mind is at
the present day. So highly does he place
the soul, that if it can but retain its con-
sciousness and attain its desires he thinks
it matters not if the entire material world
disappears. Yet the work teems with ad-
miration of material beauty. He considers
the idea of deity inferior, and believes that
there is something higher. He ends as he
commences with prayer for the fullest soul-
life. The book, in fact, might have been
called an Autobiography of a Soul, or of
Thought. It is not an autobiography of
the petty events of life; from the Author's
point of view the soul is the man, and not
the clothes he wears."

C. J. LONGMAN.

THE
STORY OF MY HEART

CHAPTER I

THE story of my heart commences seventeen
years ago. In the glow of youth there were
times every now and then when I felt the
necessity of a strong inspiration of soul-
thought. My heart was dusty, parched for
want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind
arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles
on the heart as well as that which falls on a
ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as
to the body to be always in one place and
always surrounded by the same circumstances.
A species of thick clothing slowly grows about
the mind, the pores are choked, little habits

2 THE STORY OF MY HEART

become a part of existence, and by degrees
the mind is inclosed in a husk. When this
began to form I felt eager to escape from
it, to throw it off like heavy clothing, to
drink deeply once more at the fresh foun-
tains of life. An inspiration — a long deep
breath of the pure air of thought — could
alone give health to the heart.

There was a hill to which I used to resort
at such periods. The labour of walking three
miles to it, all the while gradually ascending,
seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness
accumulated at home. On a warm summer
day the slow continued rise required con-
tinual effort, which carried away the sense
of oppression. The familiar everyday scene
was soon out of sight; I came to other
trees, meadows, and fields; I began to
breathe a new air and to have a fresher
aspiration. I restrained my soul till I
reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 3

soul that longed to be loose. I would write
psyche always instead of soul to avoid mean-
ings which have become attached to the
word soul, but it is awkward to do so.
Clumsy indeed are all words the moment
the wooden stage of commonplace life is left?.
I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached
and put my foot on the -grass at the begin-
ning of the green hill itself.

Moving up the sweet short turf, at every
step my heart seemed to obtain a wider
horizon of feeling ; with every inhalation of
rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very
light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant
here. By the time I had reached the summit
I had entirely forgotten the petty circum-
stances and the annoyances of existence. I
felt myself, myself. There was an intrench-
ment on the summit, and going dowji into
the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover
breath. On the south-western side there was

4 THE STORY OF MY HEART

a spot where the outer bank had partially
slipped, leaving a gap. There the view was
over a broad plain, beautiful with wheat, and
inclosed by a perfect amphitheatre of green
hills. Through these hills there was one
Harrow groove, or pass, southwards, where
the white clouds seemed to close in the
horizon. Woods hid the scattered hamlets
and farmhouses, so that I was quite alone.

I was utterly alone with the sun and the
earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in
my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and
the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought
of the earth's firmness — I felt it bear me up ;
through the grassy couch there came an
influence as if I could feel the great earth
speaking to me. I thought of the wandering
air — its pureness, which is its beauty; the
air touched me and gave me something of
itself. I spoke to the sea : though so far, in
my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 5

earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired
to have its strength, its mystery and glory.
Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul
1 equivalent of his light and brilliance, his
endurance and unwearied race. I turned to
the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth,
inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness.
The rich blue of the unattainable flower of
the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it
rested, for pure colour is rest of heart. By
all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the
soul beyond all definition ; prayer is a puny
thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to
the feeling, but I know no other.

By the blue heaven, by the rolling sun
bursting through untrodden space, a new
ocean of ether every day unveiled. By the
fresh and wandering air encompassing the
world; by the sea sounding on the shore —
the green sea white-flecked at the margin
and the deep ocean; by the strong earth

6 THE STORY OF MY HEART

under me. Then, returning, I prayed by the
sweet thyme, whose little flowers I touched
with my hand ; by the slender grass ; by
the crumble of dry chalky earth I took up
and let fall through my fingers. Touching
the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the
thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling
air, thinking of the sea and the sky, holding
out my hand for the sunbeams to touch
it, prone on the sward in token of deep
reverence, thus I prayed that I might touch
to the unutterable existence infinitely higher
than deity.

With all the intensity of feeling which
exalted me, all the intense communion I
held with the earth, the sun and sky, the
stars hidden by the light, with the ocean —
in no manner can the thrilling depth of these
feelings be written — with these I prayed, as
if they were the keys of an instrument, of an
organ, with which I swelled forth the notes

THE STORY OF MY HEART 7

of my soul, redoubling my own voice by
their power. The great sun burning with
lightj^ the strong earth, dear earth; the
warm sky; the pure air; the thought of
ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all filled
me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus.
With this inflatus, too, I prayed. Next to
myself I came and recalled myself, my bodily
existence. 1 held out my hand, the sunlight
gleamed on the skin and the iridescent nails;
I recalled the mystery and beauty of the
flesh. I thought of the mind with which I
could see the ocean sixty miles distant, and
gather to myself its glory. I thought of my
inner existence, that consciousness which is
called the soul. These, that is, myself — I
threw into the balance to weigh the prayer
the heavier. My strength of body, mind and
soul, I flung into it ; I put forth my strength ;
I wrestled and laboured, and toiled in might
of prayer. The prayer, this soul-emotion

8 THE STORY OF MY HEART

was in itself — not for an object — it was a
passion. I hid my face in the grass, I was
wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle,
I was rapt and carried away.

Becoming calmer, I returned to myself
and thought, reclining in rapt thought, full
of aspiration, steeped to the lips of my soul
in desire. I did not then define, or analyse,
or understand this. I see now that what I
laboured for was soul-life, more soul-nature,
to be exalted, to be full of soul-learning.
Finally I rose, walked half a mile or so along
the summit of the hill eastwards, to soothe
myself and come to the common ways of life
again. Had any shepherd accidentally seen
me lying on the turf, he would only have
thought that I was resting a few minutes; I
made no outward show. Who could have
imagined the whirlwind of passion that was
going on within me as I reclined there! I
was greatly exhausted when I reached home.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 9

Occasionally I went upon the hill deliberately,
deeming it good to do so ; then, again, this
craving carried me away up there of itself.
Though the principal feeling was the same,
there were variations in the mode in which
it affected me.

Sometimes on lying down on the sward I
first looked up at the sky, gazing for a long
time till I could see deep into the azure and
my eyes were full of the colour; then I
turned my face to the grass and thyme,
placing my hands at each side of my face
so as to shut out everything and hide my-
self. Having drunk deeply of the heaven
above and felt the most glorious beauty of
the day, and remembering the old, old sea,
which (as it seemed to me) was but just
yonder at the edge, I now became lost, and
absorbed into the being or existence of the
universe. I felt down deep into the earth
under, and high above into the sky, and

ro THE STORY OF MY HEART

farther still to the sun and stars. Still
farther beyond the stars into the hollow
of space, and losing thus my separateness of
being came to seem like a part of the whole.
Then I whispered to the earth beneath,
through the grass and thyme, down into the
depth of its ear, and again up to the starry
space hid behind the blue of day. Travel-
ling in an instant across the distant sea, I
saw as if with actual vision the palms and
cocoanut trees, the bamboos of India, and
the cedars of the extreme south. Like a
lake with islands the ocean lay before me,
as clear and vivid as the plain beneath in
the midst of the amphitheatre of hills.

With the glory of the great sea, I said,
with the firm, solid, and sustaining earth ;
the depth, distance, and expanse of ether;
the age, tamelessness, and ceaseless motion
of the ocean ; the stars, and the unknown
in space ; by all those things which are most

THE STORY OF MY HEART n

powerful known to me, and by those which
exist, but of which I have no idea whatever,
I pray. Further, by my own soul, that secret
existence which above all other things bears
the nearest resemblance to the ideal of spirit,
infinitely nearer than earth, sun, or star.
Speaking by an inclination towards, not in
words, my soul prays that I may have some-
thing from each of these, that I may gather
a flower from them, that I may have in
myself the secret and meaning of the earth,
the golden sun, the light, the foam-flecked
sea. Let my soul become enlarged; I am
not enough ; I am little and contemptible.
I desire a greatness of soul, an irradiance
of mind, a deeper insight, a broader hope.
Give me power of soul, so that I may
actually effect by its will that which I strive
for.

In winter, though I could not then rest
on the grass, or stay long enough to form

12 THE STORY OF MY HEART

any definite expression, I still went up to
the hill once now and then, for it seemed
that to merely visit the spot repeated all that
I had previously said. But it was not only
then.

In summer I went out into the fields,
and let my soul inspire these thoughts under
the trees, standing against the trunk, or look-
ing up through the branches at the sky. If
trees could speak, hundreds of them would
say that I had had these soul-emotions under
them. Leaning against the oak's massive
trunk, and feeling the rough bark and the
lichen at my back, looking southwards over
the grassy fields, cowslip-yellow, at the woods
on the slope, I thought my desire of deeper
soul-life. Or under the green firs, looking
upwards, the sky was more deeply blue at
their tops; then the brake fern was unroll-
ing, the doves cooing, the thickets astir, the
late ash-leaves coming forth. Under the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 13

shapely rounded elms, by the hawthorn
bushes and hazel, everywhere the same deep
desire for the soul-nature; to have from all
green things and from the sunlight the inner
meaning which was not known to them, that
I might be full of light as the woods of the
sun's rays. Just to touch the lichened bark
of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting
over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat
the same prayer in me.

The long-lived summer ^ys dried and
warmed the turf in the meadows. I used to
lie down in solitary corners at full length on
my back, so as to feel the embrace of the
earth. The grass stood high above me, and
the shadows of the tree-branches danced on
my face. I looked up at the sky, with half-
closed eyes to bear the dazzling light. Bees
buzzed over me, sometimes a butterfly passed,
there was a hum in the air, greenfinches sang
in the hedge. Gradually entering into the

14 THE STORY OF MY HEART

intense life of the summer days — a life which
burned around as if every grass blade and
leaf were a torch — I came to feel the long-
drawn life of the earth back into the dimmest
past, while the sun of the moment was warm
on me. Sesostris on the most ancient sands
of the south, in ancient, ancient days, was
conscious of himself and of the sun. This
sunlight linked me through the ages to that
past consciousness. From all the ages my
soul desired to«take that soul-life which had
flowed through them as the sunbeams had
continually poured on earth. As the hot
sands take up the heat, so would I take up
that soul-energy. Dreamy in appearance, I
was breathing full of existence; I was aware
of the grass blades, the flowers, the leaves
on hawthorn and tree. I seemed to live
more largely through them, as if each were
a pore through which I drank. The grass-
hoppers called and leaped, the greenfinches

THE STORY OF MY HEART 15

sang, the blackbirds happily fluted, all the
air hummed with life. I was plunged deep
in existence, and with all that existence I
prayed.

Through every grass blade in the thousand,
thousand grasses; through the million leaves,
veined and edge -cut, on bush and tree;
through the song - notes and the marked
feathers of the birds; through the insects'
hum and the colour of the butterflies ; through
the soft warm air, the flecks of clouds dis-
solving— I used them all for prayer. With
all the energy the sunbeams had poured un-
wearied on the earth since Sesostris was
conscious of them on the ancient sands ; with
all the life that had been lived by vigorous
man and beauteous woman since first in
dearest Greece the dream of the gods was
woven ; with all the soul-life that had flowed
a long stream down to me, I prayed that I
might have a soul more than equal to, far

1 6 THE STORY OF MY HEART

beyond my conception of, these things of the
past, the present, and the fulness of all life.
Not only equal to these, but beyond, higher,
and more powerful than I could imagine.
That I might take from all their energy,
grandeur, and beauty, and gather it into
me. That my soul might be more than the
cosmos of life.

I prayed with the glowing clouds of sun-
set and the soft light of the first star coming
through the violet sky. At night with the
stars, according to the season : now with the
Pleiades, now with the Swan or burning
Sirius, and broad Orion's whole constellation,
red Aldebaran, Arcturus, and the Northern
Crown; with the morning star, the light-
bringer, once now and then when I saw it, a
white-gold ball in the violet-purple sky, or
framed about with pale summer vapour float-
ing away as red streaks shot horizontally in
the east. A diffused saffron ascended into

THE STORY OF MY HEART 17

the luminous upper azure. The disk of the
sun rose over the hill, fluctuating with throbs
of light; his chest heaved in fervour of bril-
liance. All the glorj of the sunrise filled me
with broader and furnace-like vehemence of
prayer. That I might have the deepest of
soul-life, the deepest of all, deeper far than
all this greatness of the visible universe and
even of the invisible; that I might have a
fulness of soul till now unknown, and utterly
beyond my own conception.

.In the deepest darkness of the night the
same thought rose in my mind as in the
bright light of noontide. What is there
which I have not used to strengthen the
same emotion ?

CHAPTER II

SOMETIMES I went to a deep, narrow valley
in the hills, silent and solitary. The sky
crossed from side to side, like a roof supported
on two walls of green. Sparrows chirped in
the wheat at the verge above, their calls fall-
ing like the twittering of swallows from the
air. There was no other sound. The short
grass was dried grey as it grew by the heat;
the sun hung over the narrow vale as K it
had been put there by hand. Burning, burn-
ing, the sun glowed on the sward at the foot
of the slope where these thoughts burned
into me. How many, many years, how
many cycles of years, how many bundles of
cycles of years, had the sun glowed down
thus on that hollow? Since it was formed

THE STORY OF MY HEART 19

how long ? Since it was worn and shaped,
groove like, in the flanks of the hills by mighty
forces which had ebbed. Alone with the
sun which glowed on the work when it was
done, I saw back through space to the old
time of tree-ferns, of the lizard flying through
the air, the lizard - dragon wallowing in sea
foam, the mountainous creatures, twice-
elephantine, feeding on land; all the crooked
sequence of life. The dragon - fly which
passed me traced a continuous descent from
the fly marked on stone in those days. The
immense time lifted me like a wave rolling
under a boat ; my mind seemed to raise itself
as the swell of the cycles came ; it felt strong
with the power of the ages. With all that
time and power I prayed: that I might have
in my soul the intellectual part of it; the
idea, the thought. Like a shuttle the mind
shot to and fro the past and the present, in
an instant.

20 THE STORY OF MY HEART

Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I
felt the wondrous present. For the day — the
very moment I breathed, that second of time
then in the valley, was as marvellous, as
grand, as all that had gone before. Now,
this moment was the wonder and the glory.
Now, this moment was exceedingly wonder-
ful. Now, this moment give me all the
thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in
the cosmos around me. Give me still more,
for the interminable universe, past and pre-
sent, is but earth ; give me the unknown
soul, wholly apart from it, the soul of
which I know only that when I touch the
ground, when the sunlight touches my hand,
it is not there. Therefore the heart looks
into space to be away from earth. With
all the cycles, and the sunlight streaming
through them, with all that is meant by the
present, I thought in the deep vale and
prayed.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 21

There was a secluded spring to which I
sometimes went to drink the pure water,
lifting it in the hollow of my hand. Drinking
the lucid water, clear as light itself in solu-
tion, I absorbed the beauty and purity of it.
I drank the thought of the element ; I desired
soul- nature pure and limpid. When I saw
the sparkling dew on the grass — a rainbow
broken into drops — it called up the same
thought-prayer. The stormy wind whose
sudden twists laid the trees on the ground
woke the same feeling; my heart shouted
with it. The soft summer air which entered
when I opened my window in the morning
breathed the same sweet desire. At night,
before sleeping, I always looked out at the
shadowy trees, the hills looming indistinctly
in the dark, a star seen between the drifting
clouds ; prayer of soul-life always. I chose
the highest room, bare and gaunt, because
as I sat at work I could look out and see

22 THE STORY OF MY HEART

more of the wide earth, more of* the dome
of the sky, and could think my desire
through these. When the crescent of the
new moon shone, all the old thoughts were
renewed.

All the succeeding incidents of the year
repeated my prayer as I noted them. The
first green leaf on the hawthorn, the first
spike of meadow grass, the first song of the
nightingale, the green ear of wheat. I spoke
it with the ear of wheat as the sun tinted
it golden ; with the whitening barley ; again
with the red gold spots of autumn on the
beech, the buff oak leaves, and the gossamer
dew-weighted. All the larks over the green
corn sang it for me, all the dear swallows ;
the green leaves rustled it ; the green brook-
flags waved it ; the swallows took it with
them to repeat it for me in distant lands.
By the running brook I meditated it ; a flash
of sunlight here in the curve, a flicker yonder

THE STORY OF MY HEART 23

on the ripples, the birds bathing in the sandy
shallow, the rush of falling water. As the
brook ran winding through the meadow, so
one thought ran winding through my days.

The sciences I studied never checked it
for a moment ; nor did the books of old
philosophy. The sun was stronger than
science; the hills more than philosophy.
Twice circumstances gave me a brief view of
the sea ; then the passion rose tumultuous as
the waves. It was very bitter to me to leave
the sea.

Sometimes I spent the whole day walking
over the hills searching for it ; as if the
labour of walking would force it from the
ground. I remained in the woods for hours,
among the ash sprays and the fluttering of
the ring-doves at their nests, the scent of
pines here and there, dreaming my prayer.

My work was most uncongenial and use-
less, but even then sometimes a gleam of

24 THE STORY OF MY HEART

sunlight on the wall, the buzz of a bee at the
window, would bring the thought to me.
Only to make me miserable, for it was a
waste of golden time while the rich sunlight
streamed on hill and plain. There was a
wrenching of the mind, a straining of the
mental sinews ; I was forced to do this, my
mind was yonder. Weariness, exhaustion,
nerve-illness often ensued. The insults which
are showered on poverty, long struggle of
labour, the heavy pressure of circumstances,
the unhappiness, only stayed the expression
of the feeling. It was always there. Often
in the streets of London, as the red sunset
flamed over the houses, the old thought, the
old prayer, came.

Not only in grassy fields with green leaf
and running brook did this constant desire
find renewal. More deeply still with living
human beauty ; the perfection of form, the
simple fact of form, ravished and always will

THE STORY OF MY HEART 25

ravish me away. In this lies the outcome
and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and
green leaf, of flowers, pure water, and sweet
air. This is embodiment and highest ex-
pression; the scattered, uncertain, and de-
signless loveliness of tree and sunlight
brought to shape. Through this beauty I
prayed deepest and longest, and down to this
hour. The shape — the divine idea of that
shape — the swelling muscle or the dreamy
limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphro-
dite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may
have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let divine
beauty bring to me divine soul. Swart
Nubian, white Greek, delicate Italian, mas-
sive Scandinavian, in all the exquisite
pleasure the form gave, and gives,- to me
immediately becomes intense prayer.

If I could have been in physical shape
like these, how despicable in comparison I
am ; to be shapely of form is so infinitely

26 THE STORY OF MY HEART

beyond wealth, power, fame, all that ambition
can give, that these are dust before it.
Unless of the human form, no pictures hold
me; the rest are flat surfaces. So, too, with
the other arts, they are dead; the potters,
the architects, meaningless, stony, and some
repellent, like the cold touch of porcelain.
No prayer with these. Only the human form
in art could raise it, and most in statuary. I
have seen so little good statuary, it is a
regret to me; -still, that I have is beyond all
other art. Fragments here, a bust yonder,
the broken pieces brought from Greece, copies,
plaster casts, a memory of an Aphrodite, of
a Persephone, of an Apollo, that is all; but
even drawings of statuary will raise the
prayer. • These statues were like myself full
of a thought, for ever about to burst forth
as a bud, yet silent in the same attitude.
Give me to live the soul-life they express.
The smallest fragment of marble carved in

THE STORY OF MY HEART 27

the shape of the human arm will wake the
desire I felt in my hill-prayer.

Time went on; good fortune and success
never for an instant deceived me that they
were in themselves to be sought; only my
soul-thought was worthy. Further years
bringing much suffering, grinding the very life
out; new troubles, renewed insults, loss of
what hard labour had earned, the bitter ques-
tion : Is it not better to leap into the sea ?
These, too, have made no impression ; con-
stant still to the former prayer my mind
endures. It was my chief regret that I had
not endeavoured to write these things, to
give expression to this- passion. I am now
trying, but I see that I shall only in part
succeed.

The same prayer comes to me at this
very hour. It is now less solely associated
with the sun and sea, hills, woods, or beau-
teous human shape. It is always within.

28 THE STORY OF MY HEART

It requires no waking ; no renewal ; it is
always with me. I am it; the fact of my
existence expresses it.

After a long interval I came to the fulls
again, this time by the coast. I found a
deep hollow on the side of a great hill, a
green concave opening to the sea, where I
could rest and think in perfect quiet. Be-
hind me were furze bushes dried by the
heat; immediately in front dropped the steep
descent of the bowl-like hollow which received
and brought up to me the faint sound of the
summer waves. Yonder lay the immense
plain of sea, the palest green under the con-
tinued sunshine, as though the heat had
evaporated the colour from it; there was no
distinct horizon, a heat-mist inclosed it and
looked farther away than the horizon would
have done. Silence and sunshine, sea and
hill gradually brought my mind into the con-
dition of intense prayer. Day after day, for

THE STORY OF MY HEART 29

hours at a time, I came there, my soul-desire
always the same. Presently I began to con-
sider how I could put a part of that prayer
into form, giving it an object. Could I
bring it into such a shape as would admit of
actually working upon the lines it indicated
for any good ?

One evening, when the bright white star
in Lyra was shining almost at the zenith
over me, and the deep concave was the more
profound in the dusk, I formulated it into
three divisions. First, I desired that I might
do or find something to exalt the soul, some-
thing to enable it to live its own life, a more
powerful existence now. Secondly, I desired
to be able to do something for the flesh, to
make a discovery or perfect a method by
which the fleshly body might enjoy more
pleasure, longer life, and suffer less pain.
Thirdly, to construct a more flexible engine
with which to carry into execution the design

30 THE STORY OF MY HEART

of the will. I called this the Lyra prayer,
to distinguish it from the far deeper emotion
in which the soul was alone concerned.

Of the three divisions, the last was of so
little importance that it scarcely deserved to
be named in conjunction with the others.
Mechanism increases convenience — in no de-
gree does it confer physical or moral per-
fection. The rudimentary engines employed
thousands of years ago in raising buildings
were in that respect equal to the complicated
machines of the present day. Control of iror
and steel has not altered or improved the
bodily man. I even debated some time
whether such a third division should be in-
cluded at all. Our bodies are now conveyed
all round the world with ease, but obtain no
advantage. As they start so they return.
The most perfect human families of ancient
times were almost stationary, as those of
Greece. Perfection of form was found in

THE STORY OF MY HEART 31

Sparta; how small a spot compared to those
continents over which we are now taken so
quickly! Such perfection of form might
perhaps again dwell, contented and complete
in itself, on such a strip of land as I could
see between me and the sand of the sea.
Again, a watch keeping correct time is no
guarantee that the bearer shall not suffer
pain. The owner of the watch may be soul-
less, without mind- fire, a mere creature. No
benefit to the heart or to the body accrues
from the most accurate mechanism. Hence
I debated whether the third division should
be included. But I reflected that time cannot
be put back on the dial, we cannot return to
Sparta; there is an existent state of things,
and existent multitudes ; and possibly a more
powerful engine, flexible to the will, might
give them that freedom which is the one, and
the one only, political or social idea I possess.
For liberty, therefore, let it be included.

32 THE STORY OF MY HEART

For the flesh, this arm of mine, the limbs
of others gracefully moving, let me find
something that will give them greater per-
fection. That the bones may be firmer,
somewhat larger if that would be an advan
tage, certainly stronger, that the cartilage
and sinews may be more enduring, and the
muscles more powerful, something after the
manner of those ideal limbs and muscles
sculptured of old, these in the flesh and real.
That the organs of the body.may be stronger
in their action, perfect, and lasting. That
the exterior flesh may be yet more beautiful;
that the shape may be finer, and the motions
graceful. These are the soberest words I
can find, purposely chosen ; for I am so rapt
in the beauty of the human form, and so
earnestly, so inexpressibly, prayerful to see
that form perfect, that my full thought is
not to be written. Unable to express it fully,
I have considered it best to put it in the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 33

simplest manner of words. I believe in the
human form; let me find something, some
method, by which that form may achieve the
utmost beauty. Its beauty is like an arrow,
which may be shot any distance according
to the strength of the bow. So the idea
expressed in the human shape is capable of
indefinite expansion and elevation of beauty.

Of the mind, the inner consciousness, the
soul, my prayer desired that I might discover
a mode of life for it, so that it might not only
conceive of such a life, but actually enjoy it
on the earth. I wished to search out a new
and higher set of ideas on which the mind
should work. The simile of a new book of
the soul is the nearest to convey the meaning
— a book drawn from the present and future,
not the past. Instead of a set of ideas based
on tradition, let me give the mind a new
thought drawn straight from the wondrous
present, direct this very hour. Next, to

34 THE STORY OF MY HEART

furnish the soul with the means of executing
its will, of carrying thought into action. In
other words, for the soul to become a power.
These three formed the Lyra prayer, of which
the two first are immeasurably the more
important. I believe in the human being,
mind and flesh; form and soul.

It happened just afterwards that I went
to Pevensey, and immediately the ancient
wall swept my mind back seventeen hundred
years to the eagle, the pilum, and the short
sword. The grey stones, the thin red bricks
' laid by those whose eyes had seen Caesar's
Rome, lifted me out of the grasp of house-
life, of modern civilisation, of those minutiae
which occupy the moment. The grey stone
made me feel as if I had existed from then
till now, so strongly did I enter into and see
my own life as if reflected. My own exist-
ence was focussed back on me; I saw its
joy, its unhappiness, its birth, its death, its

THE STORY OF MY HEART 35

possibilities among the infinite, above all its
yearning Question. Why ? Seeing it thus
clearly, and lifted out of the moment by
the force of seventeen centuries, I recognised
the full mystery and the depths of things in
the roots of the dry grass on the wall, in the
green sea flowing near. Is there anything I
can do? The mystery and the possibilities
are not in the roots of the grass, nor is the
depth of things in the sea; they are in my
existence, in my soul. The marvel of exist-
ence, almost the terror of it, was flung on
me with crushing force by the sea, the sun
shining, the distant hills. With all their pon-
derous weight they made me feel myself: all
the time, all the centuries made me feel my-
self this moment a hundred-fold. I deter-
mined that I would endeavour to write what
I had so long thought of, and the same
evening put down one sentence. There the
sentence remained two years. I tried to carry

36 THE STORY OF MY HEART

it on ; I hesitated because I could not express
it : nor can I now, though in desperation
I am throwing these rude stones of thought
together, rude as those of the ancient
wall.

CHAPTER III

THERE were grass-grown tumuli on the hills
to which of old I used to walk, sit down at
the foot of one of them, and think. Some
warrior had been interred there in the ante-
historic times. The sun of the summer morn-
ing shone on the dome of sward, and the air
came softly up from the wheat below, the tips
of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing
faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by
to the thyme and heathbells. I became ab-
sorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine,
the sweet air, the yellowing corn turning
from its sappy green to summer's noon of
gold, the lark's song like a waterfall in the
sky. I felt at that moment that I was
like the spirit of the man whose body was

37

38 THE STORY OF MY HEART

interred in the tumulus; I could understand
and feel his existence the same as my own.
He was as real to me two thousand years
after interment as those I had seen in the
body. The abstract personality of the dead
seemed as existent as thought. As my
thought could slip back the twenty centuries
in a moment to the forest-days when he
hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunt-
ing the deer, and could return again as
swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could
endure from then till now, and the time
was nothing.

Two thousand years being a second to
the soul could not cause its extinction. It
was no longer to the soul than my thought
occupied to me. Recognising my own inner
consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death
did not seem to me to affect the personality.
In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm,
no unfathomable gulf of separation ; the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 39

spirit did not immediately become inacces-
sible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable
distance. Look at another person while
living; the soul is not visible, only the body
which it animates. Therefore, merely be-
cause after death the soul is not visible is
no demonstration that it does not still live.
The condition of being unseen is the same
condition which occurs while the body is
living, so that intrinsically there is nothing
exceptionable, or supernatural, in the life of
the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus,
the spirit of the man who had been interred
there was to me really alive, and very close.
This was quite natural, as natural and simple
as the grass waving in the wind, the bees
humming, and the larks' songs. Only by
the strongest effort of the mind could I
understand the idea of extinction; that was
supernatural, requiring a miracle; the im-
mortality of the soul natural, like earth.

40 THE STORY OF MY HEART

Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt
immortality as I felt the beauty of the
summer morning, and I thought beyond
immortality, of other conditions, more beau-
tiful than existence, higher than immor-
tality.

That there is no knowing, in the sense
of written reasons, whether the soul lives
on or not, I am fully aware. I do not hope
or fear. At least while I am living I have
enjoyed the idea of immortality, and the idea
of my own »oul. If then, after death, I am
resolved without exception into earth, air,
and water, and the spirit goes out like a
flame, still I shall have had the glory of
that thought.

It happened once that a man was drowned
while bathing, and his body was placed in an
outhouse near the garden. I passed the out-
house continually, sometimes on purpose to
think about it, and it always seemed to me

THE STORY OF MY HEART 41

that the man was still living. Separation is
not to be comprehended ; the spirit of the
man did not appear to have gone to an in-
conceivable distance. As my thought flashes
itself back through the centuries to the luxury
of Canopus, and can see the gilded couches of
a city extinct, so it slips through the future,
and immeasurable time in front is no boun-
dary to it. Certainly the man was not dead
to me.

Sweetly the summer air came up to the
tumulus, the grass sighed softly, the butter-
flies went by, sometimes alighting on the green
dome. Two thousand years ! Summer after
summer the blue butterflies had visited the
mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind
sighed in the grass. The azure morning had
spread its arms over the low tomb; and full
glowing noon burned on it ; the purple of
sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy in the
vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at

42 THE STORY OF MY HEART

midnight through the mystic summer night,
which is dusky and yet full of light. White
mists swept up and hid it; dews rested on
the turf; tender harebells drooped ; the wings
of the finches fanned the air — finches whose
colours faded from the wings how many
centuries ago ! Brown autumn dwelt in the
woods beneath ; the rime of winter whitened
the beech clump on the ridge; again the
buds came on the wind-blown hawthorn
bushes, and in the evening the broad con-
stellation of Orion covered the east. Two
thousand times ! Two thousand times the
woods grew green, and ring-doves built their
nests. Day and night for two thousand
years — light and shadow sweeping over the
mound — two thousand years of labour by
day and slumber by night. Mystery gleaming
in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine,
speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun
and of far space, for twenty centuries round

THE STORY OF MY HEART 43

about this low and green-grown dome. Yet
all that mystery and wonder is as nothing to
the Thought that lies therein, to the spirit
that I feel so close.

Realising that spirit, recognising my own
inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I
cannot understand time. It is eternity now.
I am in the midst of it. It is about me in
the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly
floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to
come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is
the immortal life. Here this moment, by
this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it.
The years, the centuries, the cycles are ab-
solutely nothing; it is only a moment since
this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years
more it will still be only a moment. To
the soul there is no past and no future; all
is and will be ever, in now. For artificial
purposes time is mutually agreed on, but
there is really no such thing. The shadow

44 THE STORY OF MY HEART

goes on upon the dial, the index moves round
upon the clock, and what is the difference?
None whatever. If the clock had never been
set going, what would have been the differ-
ence? There may be time for the clock,
the clock may make time for itself; there is
none for me.

I dip my hand in the brook and feel the
stream ; in an instant the particles of water
which first touched me have floated yards
down the current, my hand remains there.
I take my hand away, and the flow — the
time — of the brook does not exist to me.
The great clock of the firmament, the sun
and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth
circling two thousand times, is no more to
me than the flow of the brook when my
hand is withdrawn ; my soul has never been,
and never can be, dipped in time. Time
has never existed, and never will; it is
a purely artificial arrangement. It is eter-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 45

nity now, it always was eternity, and always
will be. By no possible means could I get
into time if I tried. I am in eternity now
and must there remain. Haste not, be at
rest, this Now is eternity. Because the idea
of time has left my mind — if ever it had
any hold on it — to me the man interred in
the tumulus is living now as I live. We
are both in eternity.

There is no separation — no past; eternity,
the Now, is continuous. When all the stars
have revolved they only produce Now again.
The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it
appears to me purely natural, and not super-
natural, that the soul whose temporary frame
was interred in this mound should be existing
as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper
is thought than the million miles of the firma-
ment ! The wonder is here, not there ; now,
not to be, now always. Things that have been
miscalled supernatural appear to me simple,

46 THE STORY OF MY HEART

more natural than nature, than earth, than sea,
or sun. It is beyond telling more natural
that I should have a soul than not, that there
should be immortality ; I think there is much
more than immortality. It is matter which is
the supernatural, and difficult of understand-
ing. Why this clod of earth I hold in my
hand ? Why this water which drops spark-
ling from my fingers dipped in the brook?
Why are they at all? When? How?
What for? Matter is beyond understanding,
mysterious, impenetrable ; I touch it easily,
comprehend it, no. Soul, mind — the thought,
the idea — is easily understood, it understands
itself and is conscious.

The supernatural miscalled, the natural in
truth, is the real. To me everything is
supernatural. How strange that condition
of mind which cannot accept anything but
the earth, the sea, the tangible universe!
Without the misnamed supernatural these to

THE STORY OF MY HEART 47

me seem incomplete, unfinished. Without
soul all these are dead. Except when I walk
by the sea, and my soul is by it, the sea
is dead. Those seas by which no man has
stood — by which no soul has been — whether
on earth or the planets, are dead. No matter
how majestic the planet rolls in space, unless
' a soul be there it is dead. As I move about
in the sunshine I feel in the midst of the
supernatural : in the midst of immortal things.
It is impossible to wrest the mind down to
the same laws that rule pieces of timber, water,
or earth. They do not control the soul, how-
ever rigidly they may bind matter. So full
am I always of a sense of the immortality
now at this moment round about me, that
it would not surprise me in the least if a
circumstance outside physical experience oc-
curred. It would seem to me quite natural.
Give the soul the power it conceives, and
there would be nothing wonderful in it.

48 THE STORY OF MY HEART

I can see nothing astonishing in what
are called miracles. Only those who are
mesmerised by matter can find a difficulty
in such events. I am aware that the evi-
dence for miracles is logically and histori-
cally untrustworthy; I am not defending
recorded miracles. My point is that in prin-
ciple I see no reason at all why they should'
not take place this day. I do not even say
that there are or ever have been miracles,
but I maintain that they would be perfectly
natural. The wonder rather is that they do
not happen frequently. Consider the limit-
less conceptions of the soul : let it possess
but the power to realise those conceptions for
one hour, and how little, how trifling would
be the helping of the injured or the sick to
regain health and happiness — merely to think
it. A soul-work would require but a thought.
Soul-work is an expression better suited to
my meaning than " miracle," a term like

THE STORY OF MY HEART 49

others into which a special sense has been
infused.

When I consider that I dwell this moment
in the eternal Now that has ever beep, and
will be, that I am in the midst of immortal
things this moment, that there probably are
Souls as infinitely superior to mine as mine
to a piece of timber, what then, pray, is a
" miracle " ? As commonly understood, a
" miracle " is a mere nothing. I can conceive
soul-works done by simple will or thought a
thousand times greater. I marvel that they
do not happen this moment. The air, the
sunlight, the night, all that surrounds me
seems crowded with inexpressible powers,
with the influence of Souls, or existences, so
that I walk in the midst of immortal things.
I myself am a living witness of it. Some-
times I have concentrated myself, and driven
away by continued will all sense of outward
appearances, looking straight with the full

50 THE STORY OF MY HEART

power of my mind inwards on myselt. I find
" I " am there ; an " I " I do not wholly under-
stand, or know — something is there distinct
from earth and timber, from flesh and bones.
Recognising it, I feel on the margin of a life un-
known, very near, almost touching it : on the
verge of powers which if I could grasp would
give me an immense breadth of existence, an
ability to execute what I now only conceive;
most probably of far more than that. To see
that " I " is to know that I am surrounded
with immortal things. If, when I die, that
" I " also dies, and becomes extinct, still even
then I have had the exaltation of these ideas.
How many words it has taken to describe
so briefly the feelings and the thoughts that
came to me by the tumulus; thoughts that
swept past and were gone, and were suc-
ceeded by others while yet the shadow of
the mound had not moved from one thyme-
flower to another, not the breadth of a grass

THE STORY OF MY HEART 51

blade. Softly breathed the sweet south wind,
gently the yellow corn waved beneath; the
ancient, ancient sun shone on the fresh grass
and the flower, my heart opened wide as the
broad, broad earth. I spread my arms out,
laying them on the sward, seizing the grass,
to take the fulness of the days. Could I
have my own way after death I would be
burned on a pyre of pine-wood, open to the
air, and placed on the summit of the hills.
Then let my ashes be scattered abroad — not
collected in an urn — freely sown wide and
broadcast. That is the natural interment of
man — of man whose Thought at least has
been among the immortals; interment in the
elements. Burial is not enough, it does not
give sufficient solution into the elements
speedily; a furnace is confined. The high
open air of the topmost hill, there let the
tawny flame lick up the fragment called the
body ; there cast the ashes into the space U

52 THE STORY OF MY HEART

longed for while living. Such a luxury of
interment is only for the wealthy ; I fear I
shall not be able to afford it. Else the
smoke of my resolution into the elements
should certainly arise in time on the hill-top.

The silky grass sighs as the wind comes
carrying the blue butterfly more rapidly than
his wings. A large humble-bee burrs round
the green dome against which I rest; my
hands are scented with thyme. The sweet-
ness of the day, the fulness of the earth,
the beauteous earth, how shall I say it?

Three things only have been discovered of
that which concerns the inner consciousness
since before written history began. Three
things only in twelve thousand written,
or sculptured, years, and in the dumb,
dim time before then. Three ideas the
Cavemen primeval wrested from the un-
known, the night which is round us still
in daylight — the existence of the soul, im-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 53

mortality, the deity. These things found,
prayer followed as a sequential result. Since
then nothing further has been found in all
the twelve thousand years, as if men had
been satisfied and had found these to suf-
fice. They do not suffice me. I desire to
advance further, and to wrest a fourth, and
even still more than a fourth, from the dark-
ness of thought. I want more ideas of soul-
life. I am certain that there are more yet
to be found. A great life — an entire civilisa-
tion— lies just outside the pale of common
thought. Cities and countries, inhabitants,
intelligences, culture — an entire civilisation.
Except by illustrations drawn from familiar
things, there is no way of indicating a new
idea. I do not mean actual cities, actual
civilisation. Such life is different from any
yet imagined. A nexus of ideas exists of
which nothing is known — a vast system of
ideas — a cosmos of thought. There is an

54 THE STORY OF MY HEART

Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised.
These, rudely expressed, constitute my Fourth
Idea. It is beyond, or beside, the three dis-
covered by the Cavemen; it is in addition
to the existence of the soul; in addition
to immortality; and beyond the idea of the
deity. I think there is something more than
existence.

There is an immense ocean over which
the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of
thought has not yet been launched. I hope
to launch it. The mind of so many thou-
sand years has worked round and round
inside the circle of these three ideas as a
boat on an inland lake. Let us haul it over
the belt of land, launch on the ocean, and
sail outwards.

There is so much beyond all that has ever
yet been imagined. As I write these words,
in the very moment, I feel that the whole
air, the sunshine out yonder lighting up the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 55

ploughed earth, the distant sky, the circum-
ambient ether, and that far space, is full of
soul-secrets, soul-life, things outside the ex-
perience of all the ages. The fact of my
own existence as I write, as I exist at this
second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like,
strange, and supernatural to me, that I un-
hesitatingly conclude I am always on the
margin of life illimitable, and that there are
higher conditions than existence. Everything
around is supernatural ; everything so full of
unexplained meaning.

Twelve thousand years since the Caveman
stood at the mouth of his cavern and gazed
out at the night and the stars. He looked
again and saw the sun rise beyond the sea.
He reposed in the noontide heat under the
shade of the trees, he closed his eyes and
looked into himself. He was face to face
with the earth, the sun, the night; face to
face with himself. There was nothing be-

56 THE STORY OF MY HEART

tween ; no wall of written tradition ; no built-
up system of culture — his naked mind was
confronted by naked earth. He made three
idea-discoveries, wresting them from the un-
known; the existence of his soul, immor-
tality, the deity. Now, to-day, as I write,
I stand in exactly the same position as
the Caveman. Written tradition, systems of
culture, modes of thought, have for me no
existence. If ever they took any hold of my
mind it must have been very slight; they
have long ago been erased.

From earth and sea and .sun, from night,
the stars, from day, the trees, the hills, from
my own soul— from these I think. I stand
this moment at the mouth of the ancient
cave, face to face with nature, face to face
with the supernatural, with myself. My
naked mind confronts the unknown. I see
as clearly as the noonday that this is hot
all; I see other and higher conditions than

THE STORY OF MY HEART 57

existence; I see not only the existence of the
soul, immortality, but, in addition, I realise
a soul-life illimitable ; I realise the existence'
of a cosmos of thought ; I realise the existence
of~ an inexpressible entity infinitely higher
than deity. I strive to give utterance to a
Fourth Idea. The very idea that there is
another idea is something gained. The three
found by the Cavemen are but stepping-
stones : first links of an endless chain. At
the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face
with the unknown, they prayed. Prone in
heart to-day I pray, Give me the deepest
soul-life.

CHAPTER IV

THE wind sighs through the grass, sighs
in the sunshine; it has drifted the butterfly
eastwards along the hill. A few yards away
there lies the skull of a lamb on the turf,
white and bleached, picked clean long since
by crows and ants. Like the faint ripple of
the summer sea sounding in the hollow of
the ear, so the sweet air ripples in the grass.
The ashes of the man interred in the tumulus
are indistinguishable ; they have sunk away
like rain into the earth; so his body has
disappeared. I am under no delusion; I
am fully aware that no demonstration can
l)e given of the three stepping-stones of the
Cavemen. The soul is inscrutable; it is not

in evidence to show that it exists; immor-
il

THE STORY OF MY HEART 59

tality is not tangible. Full well I know that
reason and knowledge and experience tend
to disprove all three; that experience denies
answer to prayer. I am under no delusion
whatever; I grasp death firmly in conception
as I can grasp this bleached bone; utter
extinction, annihilation. That the soul is a
product at best of organic composition; that
it goes out like a flame. This may be the
end; my soul may sink like rain into the
earth and disappear. Wind and earth, sea,
and night and day, what then? Let my
soul be but a product, what then? I say
it is nothing to me; this only I know, that
while I have lived— now, this moment, while
I live — I think immortality, I lift my mind
to a Fourth Idea. If I pass into utter
oblivion, yet I have had that.

The original three ideas of the Cavemen,
became encumbered with superstition ; ritual
grew up, and ceremony, and long ranks of

60 THE STORY OF MY HEART

souls were painted on papyri waiting to be
weighed in the scales, and to be punished or
rewarded. These cobwebs grotesque have
sullied the original discoveries and cast them
into discredit. Erase them altogether, and
consider only the underlying principles. The
principles do not go far enough, but I shall
not discard all of them for that. Even sup-
posing the pure principles to be illusions,
and annihilation the end, even then it is
better — it is something gained to have
thought them. Thought is life ; to have
thought them is to have lived them. Ac-
cepting two of them as true in principle,
then I say that these are but the threshold.
For twelve thousand years no effort has been
made to get beyond that threshold. These
are but the primer of soul-life ; the merest
hieroglyphics chipped out, a little shape given
to the unknown.

Not to-morrow but to-day. Not the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 61

to-morrow of the tumulus, the hour of the
sunshine now. This moment give me to live
soul-life, not only after death. Now is eternity,
now I am in the midst of immortality; now
the supernatural crowds around me. Open
my mind, give my soul to see, let me live it
now on earth, while I hear the burring of the
larger bees, the sweet air in the grass, and
watch the yellow wheat wave beneath me.
Sun and earth and sea, night and day — these
are the least of things. Give me soul-life.

There is nothing human in nature. The
earth, though loved so dearly, would let me
perish on the ground, and neither bring forth
food nor water. Burning in the sky the
great sun, of whose company I have been so
fond, would merely burn on and make no
motion to assist me. Those who have been
in an open boat at sea without water have
proved the mercies of the sun, and of the deity
who did not give them one drop of rain, dying

62 THE STORY OF MY HEART

in misery under the same rays that smile so
beautifully on the flowers. In the south the
sun is the enemy; night and coolness and
rain are the friends of man. As for the sea,
it offers us salt water which we cannot drink.
The trees care nothing for us; the hill I
visited so often in days gone by has not
missed me. The sun scorches man, and will
in his naked state roast him alive. The sea
and the fresh water alike make no effort to
uphold him if his vessel founders; he casts
up his arms in vain, they come to their
level over his head, filling the spot his body
occupied. If he falls from a cliff the air
parts; the earth beneath dashes him to
pieces.

Water he can drink, but it is not pro-
duced for him; how many thousands have
perished for want of it? Some fruits are
produced which he can eat, but they do not
produce themselves for him; merely for the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 63

purpose of continuing their species. In wild,
tropical countries, at the first glance there
appears to be some consideration for him, but
it is on the surface only. The lion pounces
on him, the rhinoceros crushes him, the
serpent bites, insects torture, diseases rack
him. Disease worked its dreary will even
among the flower-crowned Polynesians. Re-
turning to our own country, this very thyme
which scents my fingers did not grow for
that purpose, but for its own. So does the
wheat beneath; we utilise it, but its original
and native purpose was for itself. By night
it is the same as by day; the stars care not,
they pursue their courses revolving, and we
are nothing to them. There is nothing
human in the whole round of nature. All
nature, all the universe that we can see, is
absolutely indifferent to us, and except to us
human life is of no more value than grass.
If the entire human race perished at this

64 THE STORY OF MY HEART

hour, what difference would it make to the
earth? What would the earth care? As
much as for the extinct dodo, or for the fate
of the elephant now going.

On the contrary, a great part, perhaps the
whole, of nature and of the universe is
distinctly anti-human. The term inhuman
does not express my meaning, anti-human is
better ; outre-human, in the sense of beyond,
outside, almost grotesque in its attitude
towards, would nearly convey it Everything
is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange,
and incomprehensible are the creatures cap-
tured out of the depths of the sea ! The dis-
torted fishes ; the ghastly cuttles ; the hideous
eel-like shapes ; the crawling shell- encrusted
things ; the centipede- like beings ; monstrous
forms, to see which gives a shock to the
brain. They shock the mind because they
exhibit an absence of design. There is no
idea in them.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 65

They have no shape, form, grace, or pur-
pose; they call up a vague sense of chaos,
chaos which the mind revolts from. It would
be a relief to the thought if they ceased to
be, and utterly disappeared from the sea.
They are not inimical of intent towards man,
not even the shark ; but there the shark is,
and that is enough. These miserably hideous
things of the sea are not anti-human in the
sense of persecution, they are outside, they
are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into
chaos, and it is vivid because these creatures,
interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are
seldom seen ; so that the mind sees them as
if only that moment they had come into ex-
istence. Use has not habituated it to them,
so that their anti-human character is at once
apparent, and stares at us with glassy eye.

But it is the same in reality with the
creatures on the earth. There are some of
these even now to which use has not accus-

66 THE STORY OF MY HEART

tomed the mind. Such, for instance, as the
toad. At its shapeless shape appearing in
an unexpected corner many people start and
exclaim. They are aware that they shall
receive no injury from it, yet it affrights
them, it sends a shock to the mind. The
reason lies in its obviously anti-human char-
acter. All the designless, formless chaos of
chance-directed matter, without idea or human
plan, squats there embodied in the pathway.
By watching the creature, and Convincing
the mind from observation that it is harm-
less, and even has uses, the horror wears
away. But still remains the form to which
the mind can never reconcile itself. Carved
in wood it is still repellent.

Or suddenly there is a rustle like a faint
hiss in the grass, and a green snake glides
over the bank. The breath in the chest
seems to lose its vitality; for an instant the
nerves refuse to transmit the force of life.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 67

The gliding yellow - streaked worm is so
utterly opposed to the ever present Idea in
the mind. Custom may reduce the horror,
but no long pondering can ever bring that
creature within the pale of the human Idea.
These are so distinctly opposite and anti-
human that thousands of years have not
sufficed to soften their outline. Various
insects and creeping creatures excite the
same sense in lesser degrees. Animals and
birds in general do not. The tiger is dreaded,
but causes no disgust. The exception is in
those that feed on offal. Horses and dogs we
love; we not only do not recognise anything
opposite in them, we come to love them.

They are useful to us, they show more or
less sympathy with us, they possess, espe-
cially the horse, a certain grace of movement.
A gloss, as it were, is thrown over them by
these attributes and by familiarity. The
shape of the horse to the eye has become

68 THE STORY OF MY HEART

conventional : it is accepted. Yet the horse
is not in any sense human. Could we look
at it suddenly, without previous acquaintance,
as at strange fishes in a tank, the ultra-human
character of the horse would be apparent. It
is the curves of the neck and body that carry
the horse past without adverse comment.
Examine the hind legs in detail, and the
curious backward motion, the shape and anti-
human curves become apparent. Dogs take
us by their intelligence, but they have no
hand; pass the hand over the dog's head,
and the shape of the skull to the sense of
feeling is almost as repellent as the form of
the toad to the sense of sight. We have
gradually gathered around us all the crea-
tures that are less markedly anti-human,
horses and dogs and birds, but they are still
themselves. They originally existed like the
wheat, for themselves ; we utilise them, but
they are not of us.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 69

There is nothing human in any living
animal. All nature, the universe as far as
we see, is and- or ultra-human, outside,
and has no concern with man. These things
are unnatural to him. By no course of
reasoning, however tortuous, can nature and
the universe be fitted to the mind. Nor can
the mind be fitted to the cosmos. My mind

cannot be twisted to it; I am separate alto-

•
gether from these designless things. The

soul cannot be wrested down to them. The
laws of nature are of no importance to it.
I refuse to be bound by the laws of the
tides, nor am I so bound. Though bodily
swung round on this rotating globe, my mind
always remains in the centre. No tidal law.
no rotation, no gravitation can control my
thought.

Centuries of thought have failed to recon-
cile and fit the mind to the universe, which
is designless, and purposeless, and without

70 THE STORY OF MY HEART

idea. I will not endeavour to fit my thought
to it any longer; I find and believe myself
to be distinct — separate ; and I will labour
in earnest to obtain the highest culture for
myself. As these natural things have no
connection with man, it follows again that
the natural is the strange and mysterious,
and the supernatural the natural.

There being nothing human in nature or
the universe, and all things being ultra-human
and without design, shape, or purpose, I
conclude that no deity has anything to do
with nature. There is no god in nature,
nor in any matter anywhere, either in the
clods on the earth or in the composition of
the stars. For what we understand by the
deity is the purest form of Idea, of Mind, and
no mind is exhibited in these. That which
controls them is distinct altogether from deity.
It is not force in the sense of electricity,
nor a deity as god, nor a spirit, not even an

THE STORY OF MY HEART 71

intelligence, but a power quite different to
anything yet imagined. I cease, therefore, to
look for deity in nature or the cosmos at
large, or to trace any marks of divine handi-
work. I search for traces of this force which
is not' god, and is certainly not the higher
than deity of whom I have written. It is a
force without a mind. I wish to indidate
something more subtle than electricity, but
absolutely devoid of consciousness, and with
no more feeling than the force which lifts
the tides.

Next, in human affairs, in the relations of
man with man, in the conduct of life, in the
events that occur, in human affairs generally,
everything happens by chance. No prudence
in conduct, no wisdom or foresight can effect
anything, for the most trivial circumstance
will upset the deepest plan of the wisest
mind. As Xenophon observed in old times,
wisdom is like casting dice and determining

72 THE STORY OF MY HEART

your course by the number that appears.
Virtue, humanity, the best and most beauti-
ful conduct is wholly in vain. The history
of thousands of years demonstrates it. In
all these years there is no more moving in-
stance on record than that of Danae, when she
was dragged to the precipice, two thousand
years ago. Sophron was governor of Ephesus,
and Laodice plotted to assassinate him.
Danae discovered the plot, and warned
Sophron, who fled, and saved his life.
Laodice — the murderess in intent — had Danae
seized and cast from a cliff. On the verge
Danae said that some persons despised the
deity, and they might now prove the justice
of their contempt by her fate. For having
saved the man who was to her as a husband,
she was rewarded in this way with cruel
death by the deity, but Laodice was ad-
vanced to honour. The bitterness of these
words remains to this hour.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 73

In truth the deity, if responsible for such
a thing, or for similar things which occur
now, should be despised. One must always
despise the fatuous belief in such a deity.
But as everything in human affairs obviously
happens by chance, it is clear that no deity
is responsible. If the deity guides chance
in that manner, then let the deity be de-
spised. Apparently the deity does not in-
terfere, and all things happen by chance.
I cease, therefore, to look for traces of
the deity in life, because no such traces
exist.

I conclude that there is an existence, a
something higher than soul — higher, better,
and more perfect than deity. Earnestly I
pray to find this something better than a
god. There is something superior, higher,
more good. For this I search, labour,
think, and pray. If after all there be no-
thing, and my soul has to go out like a

74 THE STORY OF MY HEART

flame, yet even then I have thought this
while it lives. With the whole force of my
existence, with the whole force of my thought,
mind, and soul, I pray to find this Highest
Soul, this greater than deity, this better than
god. Give me to live the deepest soul-life
now and always with this Soul. For want
of words I write soul, but I think that it
is something beyond soul.

CHAPTER V

IT is not possible to narrate these incidents
of the mind in strict order. I must now
return to a period earlier than anything
already narrated, and pass in review other
phases of my search from then up till recently.
So long since that I have forgotten the date,
I used every morning to visit a spot where I
could get a clear view of the east. Imme-
diately on rising I went out to some elms;
thence I could see across the dewy fields to
the distant hill over or near which the sun
rose. These elms partially hid me, for at
that time I had a dislike to being seen,
feeling that I should be despised if I was
noticed. This happened once or twice, and
I knew I was watched contemptuously,

75

76 THE STORY OF MY HEART

though no one had the least idea of my
object But I went every morning, and was
satisfied if I could get two or three minutes
to think unchecked. Often I saw the sun
rise over the line of the hills, but if it was
summer the sun had been up a long time.

I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass,
and then up through the elm branches to the
sky. In a moment all that was behind me,
the house, the people, the sounds, seemed to
disappear, and to leave me alone. Involun-
tarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed
slowly. My thought, or inner consciousness,
went up through the illumined sky, and I
was lost in a moment of exaltation. This
only lasted a very short time, perhaps only
part of a second, and while it lasted there
was no formulated wish. I was absorbed; I
drank the beauty of the morning; I was
exalted. When it ceased I did wish for some
increase or enlargement of my existence to

THE STORY OF MY HEART 77

correspond with the largeness of feeling I
had momentarily enjoyed. Sometimes the
wind came through the tops of the elms,
and the slender boughs bent, and gazing up
through them, and beyond the fleecy clouds,
I felt lifted up. The light coming across the
grass and leaving itself on the dew-drops, the
sound of the wind, and the sense of mounting
to the lofty heaven, filled me with a deep
sigh, a wish to draw something out of the
beauty of it, some part of that which caused
my admiration, the subtle inner essence.

Sometimes the green tips of the highest
boughs seemed gilded, the light laid a gold
on the green. Or the trees bowed to a
stormy wind roaring through them, the grass
threw itself down, and in the east broad cur-
tains of a rosy tint stretched along. The
light was turned to redness in the vapour, and
rain hid the summit of the hill. In the rush
and roar of the stormy wind the same exalta-

78 THE STORY OF MY HEART

tion, the same desire, lifted me for a moment.
I went there every morning, I could not
exactly define why; it was like going to a
rose bush to taste the scent of the flower
and feel the dew from its petals on the lips.
But I desired the beauty — the inner subtle
meaning — to be in me, that I might have it,
and with it an existence of a higher kind.

Later on I began to have daily pil-
grimages to think these things. There was
a feeling that I must go somewhere, and
be alone. It was a necessity to have a few
minutes of this separate life every day; my
mind required to live its own life apart from
other things. A great oak at a short distance
was one resort, and sitting on the grass at the
roots, or leaning against the trunk and look-
ing over the quiet meadows towards the
bright southern sky, I could live my own life
a little while. Behind the trunk I was alone ;
I liked to lean against it; to touch the lichen

THE STORY OF MY HEART 79

on the rough bark. High in the wood of
branches the birds were not alarmed; they
sang, or called, and passed to and fro happily.
The wind moved the leaves, and they replied
to it softly; and now at this distance of time
I can see the fragments of sky up through the
boughs. Bees were always humming in the
green field; ring-doves went over swiftly,
flying for the woods.

Of the sun I was conscious; I could not
look at it, but the boughs held back the
beams so that I could feel the sun's presence
pleasantly. They shaded the sun, yet let me
know that it was there. There came to me
a delicate, but at the same time a deep,
strong, and sensuous enjoyment of the beauti-
ful green earth, the beautiful sky and sun; I
felt them, they gave me inexpressible delight,
as if they embraced and poured out their love
upon me. It was I who loved them, for
my heart was broader than the earth; it is

8o THE STORY OF MY HEART

broader now than even then, more thirsty
and desirous. After the sensuous enjoy-
ment always came the thought, the desire:
That I might be like this; that I might
have the inner meaning of the sun, the light,
the earth, the trees and grass, translated into
some growth of excellence in myself, both of
body and of mind; greater perfection of
physique, greater perfection of mind and
soul; that I might be higher in myself. To
this oak I came daily for a long time; some-
times only for a minute, for just to view
the spot was enough. In the bitter cold of
spring, when the north wind blackened every-
thing, I used to come now and then at night
to look from under the bare branches at the
splendour of the southern sky. The stars
burned with brilliance, broad Orion and
flashing Sirius — there are more or brighter
constellations visible then than all the year:
and the clearness of the air and the black-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 81

ness of the sky — black, not clouded — let
them gleam in their fulness. They lifted me
— they gave me fresh vigour of soul. Not
all that the stars could have given, had
they been destinies, could have satiated me.
This, all this, and more, I wanted in myself.

There was a place a mile or so along the
road where the hills could be seen much
better; I went there frequently to think the
same thought. Another spot was by an
elm, a very short walk, where openings in
the trees, and the slope of the ground,
brought the hills well into view. This, too,
was a favourite thinking-place. Another
was a wood, half an hour's walk distant,
through part of which a rude track went, so
that it was not altogether inclosed. The
ash-saplings, and the trees, the firs, the
hazel bushes — to be among these enabled
me to be myself. From the buds of spring
to the berries of autumn, I always liked to

82 THE STORY OF MY HEART

be there. Sometimes in spring there was
a sheen of blue-bells covering acres; the
doves cooed; the blackbirds whistled sweetly;
there was a taste of green things in the air.
But it was the tall firs that pleased me most ;
the glance rose up the flame-shaped fir-tree,
tapering to its green tip, and above was the
azure sky. By aid of the tree I felt the sky
more. By aid of everything beautiful I felt
myself, and in that intense sense of conscious-
ness prayed for greater perfection of soul and
body.

Afterwards, I walked almost daily more,
than two miles along the road to a spot
where the hills began, where from the first
rise the road could be seen winding south-
wards over the hills, open and uninclosed.
I paused a minute or two by a clump of firs,
in whose branches the wind always sighed —
there is always a movement of the air on a
hill. Southwards the sky was illumined by

THE STORY OF MY HEART 83

the sun, southwards the clouds moved across
the opening or pass in the amphitheatre,
and southwards, though far distant, was
the sea. There I could think a moment.
These pilgrimages gave me a few sacred
minutes daily;' the moment seemed holy
when the thought or desire came in its full
force.

A time came when, having to live in a
town, these pilgrimages had to be suspended.
The wearisome work on which I was en-
gaged would not permit of them. But I
used to look now and then, from a window,
in the evening at a birch-tree at some
distance; its graceful boughs drooped across
the glow of the sunset. The thought was
not suspended; it lived in me always. A
bitterer time still came when it was necessary
to be separated from those I loved. There
is little indeed in the more immediate suburbs
of London to gratify the sense of the beauti-

84 THE STORY OF MY HEART

ful. Yet there was a cedar by which I
used to walk up and down, and think the
same thoughts as under the great oak in
the solitude of the sunlit meadows. In the
course of slow time happier circumstances
brought us together again, and, though near
London, at a spot where there was easy
access to meadows and woods. Hills that
purify those who walk on them there were
not. Still I thought my old thoughts.

I was much in London, and, engage-
ments completed, I wandered about in the
same way as in the woods of former days.
From the stone bridges I looked down on
the river; the gritty dust, the straws that
lie on the bridges, flew up and whirled
round with every gust from the flowing tide;
gritty dust that settles in the nostrils and on
the lips, the very residuum of all that is
repulsive in the greatest city of the world.
The noise of the traffic and the constant

THE STORY OF MY HEART 85

pressure from the crowds passing, their in-
cessant and disjointed talk, could not distract
me. One moment at least I had, a moment
when I thought of the push of the great
sea forcing the water to flow under the feet
of these crowds, the distant sea strong and
splendid; when I saw the sunlight gleam on
the tidal wavelets ; when I felt the wind, and
was conscious of the earth, the sea, the sun,
the air, the immense forces working on, while
the city hummed by the river. Nature was
deepened by the crowds and foot-worn stones.
If the tide had ebbed, and the masts of
the vessels were tilted as the hulls rested on
the shelving mud, still even the blackened
mud did not prevent me seeing the water
as water flowing to the sea. The sea had
drawn down, and the wavelets washing the
strand here as they hastened were running
the faster to it. Eastwards from London
Bridge the river raced to the ocean.

86 THE STORY OF MY HEART

The bright morning sun of summer
heated the eastern parapet of London Bridge ;
I stayed in the recess to acknowledge it.
The smooth water was a broad sheen of
light, the built-up river flowed calm and
silent by a thousand doors, rippling only
where the stream chafed against a chain.
Red pennants drooped, gilded vanes gleamed
on polished masts, black-pitched hulls glis-
tened like a black rook's feathers in sunlight ;
the clear air cut out the forward angles of
the warehouses, the shadowed wharves were
quiet in shadows that carried light; far down
the ships that were hauling out moved in
repose, and with the stream floated away
into the summer mist There was a faint
blue colour in the air hovering between
the built-up banks, against the lit walls, in
the hollows of the houses. The swallows
wheeled and climbed, twittered and glided
downwards. Burning on, the great sun stood

THE STORY OF MY HEART 87

in the sky, heating the parapet, glowing stead-
fastly upon me as when I rested in the
narrow valley grooved out in prehistoric times.
Burning on steadfast, and ever present as my
thought. Lighting the broad river, the broad
walls ; lighting the least speck of dust ;
lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my
finger-nail. The fixed point of day — the
sun. I was intensely conscious of it; I felt
it; I felt the presence of the immense
powers of the universe; I felt out into the
depths of the ether. So intensely conscious
of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I felt
too in the midst of eternity then, in the
midst of the supernatural, among the im-
mortal, and the greatness of the material
realised the spirit. By these I saw my soul ;
by these I knew the supernatural to be more
intensely real than the sun. I touched the
supernatural, the immortal, there that mo-
ment.

88 THE STORY OF MY HEART

When, weary of walking on the pave-
ments, I went to rest in the National Gallery,
I sat and rested before one or other of the
human pictures. I am not a picture lover :
they are flat surfaces, but those that I call
human are nevertheless beautiful. The knee
in Daphnis and Chloe and the breast are
like living things ; they draw the heart
towards them, the heart must love them. I
lived in looking; without beauty there is no
life for me, the divine beauty of flesh is life
itself to me. The shoulder in the Surprise,
the rounded rise of the bust, the exquisite
tints of the ripe skin, momentarily gratified
the sea-thirst in me. For I thirst with all
the thirst of the salt sea, and the sun-heated
sands dry for the tide, with all the sea I thirst
for beauty. And I know full well that one
lifetime, however long, cannot fill my heart.
My throat and tongue and whole body have
often been parched and feverish dry with

THE STORY OF MY HEART 89

this measureless thirst, and again moist to
the fingers' ends like a sappy bough. It
burns in me as the sun burns in the sky.

The glowing face of Cytherea in Titian's
Venus and Adonis, the heated cheek, the
lips that kiss each eye that gazes on them, the
desiring glance, the golden hair — sunbeams
moulded into features — this face answered me.
Juno's wide back and mesial groove, is any
thing so lovely as the back ? Cytherea's poised
hips unveiled for judgment; these called up
the same thirst I felt on the green sward in the
sun, on the wild beach listening to the quiet
sob as the summer wave drank at the land.
I will search the world through for beauty.
I came here and sat to rest before these in
the days when I could not afford to buy so
much as a glass of ale, weary and faint
from walking on stone pavements. I came
later on, in better t^mes, often straight from
labours which though necessary will ever be

90 THE STORY OF MY HEART

distasteful, always to rest my heart with
loveliness. I go still; the divine beauty of
flesh is life itself to me. It was, and is,
one of my London pilgrimages.

Another was to the Greek sculpture
galleries in the British Museum. The
statues are not, it is said, the best ; broken
too, and mutilated, and seen in a dull,
commonplace light. But they were shape —
divine shape of man and woman; the form
of limb and torso, of bust and neck, gave
me a sighing sense of rest. These were
they who would have stayed with me under
the shadow of the oaks while the blackbirds
fluted and the south air swung the cowslips.
They would have walked with me among
the reddened gold of the wheat They
would have rested with me on the hill-tops
and in the narrow valley grooved of ancient
times. They would have listened with me
to the sob of the summer sea drinking the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 91

land. These had thirsted of sun, and earth,
and sea, and sky. Their shape spoke this
thirst and desire like mine — if I had lived
with them from Greece till now I should not
have had enough of them. Tracing the form
of limb and torso with the eye gave me a
sense of rest.

Sometimes I came in from the crowded
streets and ceaseless hum; one glance at
these shapes and I became myself. Some-
times I came from the Reading-room, where
under the dome I often looked up from
the desk and realised the crushing hope-
lessness of books, useless, not equal to one
bubble borne along on the running brook
I had walked by, giving no thought like
the spring when I lifted the water in my
hand and saw the light gleam on it. Torso
and limb, bust and neck instantly returned
me to myself; I felt as I did lying on
the turf listening to the wind among the

92 THE STORY OF MY HEART

grass; it would have seemed natural to
have found butterflies fluttering among the
statues. The same deep desire was with
me. I shall always go to speak to them ;
they are a place of pilgrimage; wherever
there is a beautiful statue there is a place
of pilgrimage.

I always stepped aside, too, to look
awhile at the head of Julius Caesar. The
domes of the swelling temples of his broad
head are full of mind, evident to the eye
as a globe is full of substance to the sense
of feeling in the hands that hold it. The
thin worn cheek is entirely human; endless
difficulties surmounted by endless labour are
marked in it, as the sandblast, by dint
of particles ceaselessly driven, carves the
hardest material. If circumstances favoured
him he made those circumstances his own by
marvellous labour, so as justly to receive the
credit of chance. Therefore the thin cheek

THE STORY OF MY HEART 93

is entirely human — the sum of human life
made visible in one face — labour, and en-
durance, and mind, and all in vain. A
shadow of deep sadness has gathered on it in
the years that have passed, because endurance
was without avail. It is sadder to look at
than the grass-grown tumulus I used to sit
by, because it is a personality, and also on
account of the extreme folly of our human
race ever destroying our greatest.

Far better had they endeavoured, how-
ever hopelessly, to keep him living till this
day. Did but the race this hour possess
one-hundredth part of his breadth of view,
how happy for them ! Of whom else can it
be said that he had no enemies to forgive
because he recognised no enemy? Nineteen
hundred years ago he put in actual practice,
with more arbitrary power than any despot,
those very principles of humanity which are
now put forward as the highest culture. But

94 THE STORY OF MY HEART

he made them to be actual things under his
sway.

The one man filled with mind; the one
man without avarice, anger, pettiness, little-
ness; the one man generous and truly great
of all history. It is enough to make one
despair to think of the mere brutes butting
to death the great-minded Caesar. He comes
nearest to the ideal of a design-power arrang-
ing the affairs of the world for good in prac-
tical things. Before his face — the divine brow
of mind above, the human suffering-drawn
cheek beneath — my own thought became set
and strengthened. That I could but look at
things in the broad way he did ; that I
could not possess one particle of such width
of intellect to guide my own course, to cope
with and drag forth from the iron-resisting
forces of the universe some one thing of my
prayer for the soul and for the flesh.

CHAPTER VI

THERE is a place in front of the Royal Ex-
change where the wide pavement reaches out
like a promontory. It is in the shape of a
triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of
traffic runs on either side, and other streets
send their currents down into the open
space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel
converging streams of human life flow into
this agitated pool. Horses and carriages,
carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of
conveyance cross each other's course in every
possible direction. Twisting in and out by
the wheels and under the horses' heads,
working a devious way, men and women of
all conditions wind a path over. They fill
the interstices between the carriages and

96 THE STORY OF MY HEART

blacken the surface, till the vans almost float
on human beings. Now the streams slacken,
and now they rush amain, but never cease ;
dark waves are always rolling down the in-
cline opposite, waves swell out from the side
rivers, all London converges into this focus.
There is an indistinguishable noise — it is not
clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable ;
made up of a thousand thousand footsteps,
from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels —
of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements,
and ponderous loads ; no attention can resolve
it into a fixed sound.

Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished
carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses
and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw,
rusty-red iron clanking on paintless carts, high
white wool-packs, grey horses, bay horses,
black teams ; sunlight sparkling on brass
harness, gleaming. from carriage panels; jingle,
jingle, jingle J An intermixed and inter-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 97

tangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of
colour ; flecks of colour champed, as it
were, like bits in the horses' teeth, frothed
and strewn about, and a surface always of
dark-dressed people winding like the curves
on fast- flowing water. This is the vortex
and whirlpool, the centre of human life to-
day on the earth. Now the tide rises and
now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers
always continues. Here it seethes and
whirls, not for an hour only, but for all
present time, hour by hour, day by day, year
by year.

Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms
triturate and grind, and, eagerly thrusting by,
pursue their separate ends. Here it appears
in its unconcealed personality, indifferent to
all else but itself, absorbed and rapt in
eager self, devoid and stripped of conven-
tional gloss and politeness, yielding only to
get its own way ; driving, pushing, carried

98 THE STORY OF MY HEART

on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet,
dynamic force apart from reason or will, like
the force that lifts the tides and sends the
clouds onwards. The friction of a thousand
interests evolves a condition of electricity in
which men are moved to and fro without
considering their steps. Yet the agitated
pool of life is stonily indifferent, the thought
is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident
that the mass are unconscious of the scene
in which they act.

But it is more sternly real than the very
stones, for all these men and women that
pass through are driven on by the push of
accumulated circumstances ; they cannot stay,
they must go, their necks are in the slave's
ring, they are beaten like seaweed against
the solid walls of fact. In ancient times,
Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down
upon his myriads, wept to think that in a
hundred years not one of them would be

THE STORY OF MY HEART 99

left. Where will be these millions of to-day
in a hundred years ? But, further than that,
let us ask, Where then will be the sum and
outcome of their labour? If they wither
away like summer grass, will not at least a
result be left which those of a hundred years
hence may be the better for? No, not one
jot! There will not be any sum or outcome
or result of this ceaseless labour and move-
ment; it vanishes in the moment that it is
done, and in a hundred years nothing will
be there, for nothing is there now. There
wiH be no more sum or result than accumu-
lates from the motion of a revolving cowl
on a housetop. Nor do they receive any
more sunshine during their lives, for they
are unconscious of the sun.

I used to come and stand near the apex
of the promontory of pavement which juts
out towards the pool of life ; I still go there
to ponder. Burning in the sky, the sun

ioo THE STORY OF MY HEART

shone on me as when I rested in the narrow
valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning
in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The
heat of summer is dry there as if the light
carried an impalpable dust; dry, breathless
heat that will not let the skin respire, but
swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But
beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence
of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley,
the presence of the resistless forces of the
universe; the sun burned in the sky as I
stood and pondered. Is there any theory,
philosophy, or creed, is there any system. or
culture, any formulated method able to meet
and satisfy each separate item of this agitated
pool of human life? By which they may be
guided, by which hope, by which look for-
ward? Not a mere illusion of the craven
heart — something real, as real as the solid
walls of fact against which, like drifted sea-
weed, they are dashed ; something to give

THE STORY OF MY HEART 101

each separate personality sunshine and a
flower in its own existence now ; something
to shape this million-handed labour to an
end and outcome that will leave 'more sun-
shine and more flowers to those who must
succeed? Something real now, and not in
the spirit-land ; in this hour now, as I stand
and the sun burns. Can any creed, philo-
sophy, system, or culture endure the test
and remain unmolten in this fierce focus of
human life ?

Consider, is there anything slowly painted
on the once mystic and now commonplace
papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, held on the
mummy's withered breast? In that elaborate
ritual, in the procession of the symbols, in the
winged circle, in the laborious sarcophagus?
Nothing; absolutely nothing! Before the
fierce heat of the human furnace, the papyri
smoulder away as paper smoulders under a
lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and

loa THE STORY OF MY HEART

the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and
bearded bulls of stone, the lion hunt, the
painted chambers loaded with tile books, the
lore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in
Assyria? There are sand, and failing rivers,
and in Assyria's writings an utter nothing.
The aged caves of India, who shall tell when
they were sculptured? Far back when the
sun was burning, burning in the sky as now
in untold precedent time. Is there any
meaning in those ancient caves? The indis-
tinguishable noise not to be resolved, born of
the human struggle, mocks in answer.

In the strange characters of the Zend, in
the Sanscrit, in the effortless creed of Con-
fucius, in the Aztec coloured-string writings
and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left
of the sunken Polynesian continent, hiero-
glyphs as useless as those of Memphis,
nothing. Nothing! They have been tried,
and were found an illusion. Think then, to-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 103

day, now looking from this apex of the pave-
ment promontory outwards from our own
land to the utmost bounds of the farthest
sail, is there any faith or culture at this hour
which can stand in this fierce heat ? From
the various forms of Semitic, Aryan, or
Turanian creed now existing, from the print-
ing-press to the palm-leaf volume on to those
who call on the jewel in the lotus, can aught
be gathered which can face this, the Reality?
The indistinguishable noise, non- resolvable,
roars a loud contempt.

Turn, then, to the calm reasoning of
Aristotle; is there anything in that? Can
the half- divine thought of Plato, rising in
storeys of sequential ideas, following each
other to the conclusion, endure here? No!
All the philosophers in Diogenes Laertius
fade away : the theories of mediaeval days ;
the organon of experiment; down to this
hour — they are useless alike. The science of

io4 THE STORY OF MY HEART
this hour, drawn from the printing-press in
an endless web of paper, is powerless here;
the indistinguishable noise echoed from the
smoke -shadowed walls despises the whole.
A thousand footsteps, a thousand hoofs, a
thousand wheels roll over and utterly con-
temn them in complete annihilation. Mere
illusions of heart or mind, they are tested
and thrust aside by the irresistible push of
a million converging feet.

Burning in the sky, the sun shines as it
shone on me in the solitary valley, as it
burned on when the earliest cave of India
was carved. Above the indistinguishable roar
of the many feet I feel the presence of the
sun, of the immense forces of the universe,
and beyond these the sense of the eternal
now, of the immortal. Full well aware that
all has failed, yet, side by side with the sad-
ness of that knowledge, there lives on in me
an unquenchable belief, thought burning like

THE STORY OF MY HEART 105

the sun, that there is yet something to be
found, something real, something to give each
separate personality sunshine r and flowers in
its own existence now. Something to shape
this million -handed labour to an end and
outcome, leaving accumulated sunshine and
flowers to those who shall succeed. It must
be dragged forth by might of thought from
the immense forces of the universe.

To prepare for such an effort, first the
mind must be cleared of the conceit that,
because we live to-day, we are wiser than the
ages gone. The mind must acknowledge its
ignorance; all the learning and lore of so
many eras must be erased from it as an en-
cumbrance. It is not from past or present
knowledge, science or faith, that it is to be
drawn. Erase these altogether as they are
erased under the fierce heat of the focus
before me. Begin wholly afresh. Go straight
to the sun, the immense forces of the uni-

106 THE STORY OF MY HEART

verse, to the Entity unknown ; go higher than
a god; deeper than prayer; and open a new
day. That I might but have a fragment of
Caesar's intellect to find a fragment of this
desire !

From my home near London I made a
pilgrimage almost daily to an aspen by a
brook. - It was a mile and a quarter along
the road, far enough for me to walk off the
concentration of mind necessary for work.
The idea of the pilgrimage was to get away
from the endless and nameless circumstances
of everyday existence, which by degrees build
a wall about the mind so that it travels in a
constantly narrowing circle. This tether of the
faculties tends to make them accept present
knowledge, and present things, as all that can
be attained to. This is all — there is nothing
more — is the iterated preaching of house-life.
Remain ; be content ; go round and round in
one barren path, a little money, a little food

THE STORY OF MY HEART 107

and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and
death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with
which man for ages has in various ways
manacled himself, and stayed his own advance,
there is none equally potent with the supposi-
tion that nothing more is possible. Once well
impress on the mind that it has already all,
that advance is impossible because there is
nothing further, and it is chained like a horse
to an iron pin in the ground. It is the most
deadly — the most fatal poison of the mind.
No such casuistry has ever for a moment held
me, but still, if permitted, the constant routine
of house-life, the same work, the same thought
in the work, the little circumstances regularly
recurring, will dull the keenest edge of
thought. By my daily pilgrimage, I escaped
from it back to the sun.

In summer the leaves of the aspen rustled
pleasantly, there was the tinkle of falling
water over a hatch, thrushes sang and black-

io8 THE STORY OF MY HEART

birds whistled, greenfinches laughed in their
talk to each other. The commonplace dusty
road was commonplace no longer. In the
dust was the mark of the chaffinches' little
feet ; the white light rendered even the dust
brighter to look on. The air came from the
south-west — there were distant hills in that
direction — over fields of grass and corn. As
I visited the spot from day to day the wheat
grew from green to yellow, the wild roses
flowered, the scarlet poppies appeared, and
again the beeches reddened in autumn. In
the march of time there fell away from my
mind, as the leaves from the trees in autumn,
the last traces and relics of superstitions and
traditions acquired compulsorily in childhood.
Always feebly adhering, they finally disap-
peared.

There fell away, too, personal bias and
prejudices, enabling me to see clearer and
with wider sympathies. The glamour of

THE STORY OF MY HEART 109

modern science and discoveries faded away,
for I found them no more than the first
potter's wheel. Erasure and reception pro-
ceeded together; the past accumulations of
casuistry were erased, and my thought
widened to receive the idea of something be-
yond all previous ideas. With disbelief, belief
increased. The aspiration and hope, the
prayer, was the same as that which I felt years
before on the hills, only it now broadened.

Experience of life, instead of curtailing
and checking my prayer, led me to reject ex-
perience altogether. As well might the horse
believe that the road the bridle forces it to
traverse every day encircles the earth as I
believe in experience. All the experience of
the greatest city in the world could not with-
hold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood
bare-headed before the sun, in the presence
of the earth and air, in the presence of the
immense forces of the universe. I demand

no THE STORY OF MY HEART

that which will make me more perfect now,
this hour. London convinced me of my own
thought. That thought has always been with
me, and always grows wider.

One midsummer I went out of the road
into the fields, and sat down on the grass
between the yellowing wheat and the green
hawthorn bushes. The sun burned in the
sky, the wheat was full of a luxuriant sense
of growth, the grass high, the earth giving
its vigour to tree and leaf, the heaven blue.
The vigour and growth, the warmth and light,
the beauty and richness of it entered into me ;
an ecstasy of soul accompanied the delicate
excitement of the senses : the soul rose with
the body. Rapt in the fulness of the moment,
I prayed there with all that expansion of
mind and frame ; no words, no definition, in-
expressible desire of physical life, of soul-life,
equal to and beyond the highest imagining of
my heart.

THE STORY OF MY HEART in

These memories cannot be placed in exact
chronological order. There was a time when
a weary restlessness came upon me, perhaps
from too-long-continued labour. It was like
a drought — a moral drought — as if I had
been absent for many years from the sources
of life and hope. The inner nature was faint,
all was dry and tasteless ; I was weary for the
pure, fresh springs of thought. Some in-
stinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to
the sea; I was so under its influence that I
could not arrange the journey so as to get
the longest day. I merely started, and of
course had to wait and endure much incon-
venience. To get to the sea at some quiet
spot was my one thought ; to do so I had to
travel farther, and from want of prearrange-
ment it was between two and three in the
afternoon before I reached the end of my
journey. Even then, being too much pre-
occupied to inquire the way, I missed the

ii2 THE STORY OF MY HEART

road and had to walk a long distance before
coming to the shore. But I found the sea at
last ; I walked beside it in a trance away
from the houses out into the wheat. The
ripe corn stood up to the beach, the waves
on one side of the shingle, and the yellow
wheat on the other.

There, alone, I went down to the sea. I
stood where the foam came to my feet, and
looked out over the sunlit waters. The great
earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and
its hills golden with corn, was at my back ;
its strength and firmness under me. The
great sun shone above, the wide sea was
before me, the wind came sweet and strong
from the waves. The life of the earth and
the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I
touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my
face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind.
I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves — my
soul was strong as the sea and prayed with

THE STORY OF MY HEART 113

the sea's might. Give me fulness of life like
to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the
air; give me fulness of physical life, mind
equal and beyond their fulness; give me a
greatness and perfection of soul higher than
all things; give me my inexpressible desire
which swells in me like a tide — give it to me
with all the force of the sea.

Then I rested, sitting by the wheat ; the
bank of beach was between me and the sea,
but the waves beat against it; the sea was
there, the sea was present and at hand. By
the dry wheat I rested, I did not think, I
was inhaling the richness of the sea, all the
strength and depth of meaning of the sea and
earth came to me again. I rubbed out some
of the wheat in my hands, I took up a piece
of clod and crumbled it in my fingers — it was
a joy to touch it — I held my hand so that I
could see the sunlight gleam on the slightly
moist surface of the skin. The earth and sun

ii4 THE STORY OF MY HEART

were to me like my flesh and blood, and the
air of the sea life.

With all the greater existence I drew from
them I prayed for a bodily life equal to it, for
a soul-life beyond my thought, for my inex-
pressible desire of more than I could shape
even into idea. There was something higher
than idea, invisible to thought as air to the
eye; give me bodily life equal in fulness to
the strength of earth, and sun, and sea ; give
me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I
went down to the sea, touched it, and said
farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this
life that day, that it seemed to remain in me
for years. This was a real pilgrimage.

Time passed away, with more labour,
pleasure, and again at last, after much pain
and weariness of mind, I came down again
to the sea. The circumstances were changed
— it was not a hurried glance — there were
opportunities for longer thought. It mattered

THE STORY OF MY HEART 115

scarcely anything to me now whether I was
alone, or whether houses and other people
were near. Nothing could disturb my inner
vision. By the sea, aware of the sun overhead,
and the blue heaven, I feel that there is no-
thing between me and space. This is the verge
of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes
straight unchecked into the unknown. It is
the edge of the abyss as much as if the earth
were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thou-
sand miles to the sky beneath, thence a hollow
to the stars. Looking straight out is looking
straight down; the eye-glance gradually de-
parts from the sea-level, and, rising as that
falls, enters the hollow of heaven. It is
gazing along the face of a vast precipice into
the hollow space which is nameless.

There mystery has been placed, but realis-
ing the vast hollow yonder makes me feel
that the mystery is here. I, who am here
on the verge, standing on the margin of the

n6 THE STORY OF MY HEART

sky, am in the mystery itself. If I let my
eye look back upon me from the extreme
opposite of heaven, then this spot where I
stand is in the centre of the hollow. Alone
with the sea and sky, I presently feel all the
depth and wonder of the unknown come back
surging up around, and touching me as the
foam runs to my feet. I am in it now, not
to-morrow, this moment; I cannot escape
from it. Though I may deceive myself with
labour, yet still I am in it; in sleep too.
There is no escape from this immensity.

Feeling this by the sea, under the sun, my
life enlarges and quickens, striving to take
to itself the largeness of the heaven. The
frame cannot expand, but the soul is able
to stand before it. No giant's body could
be in proportion to the earth, but a little
spirit is equal to the entire cosmos, to earth
and ocean, sun and star-hollow. These are
but a few acres to it. Were the cosmos

THE STORY OF MY HEART 117

twice as wide, the soul could run over it,
and return to itself in a time so small, no
measure exists to mete it. Therefore, I
think the soul may sometimes find out an
existence as superior as my mind is to the
dead chalk cliff.

With the great sun burning over the foam-
flaked sea, roofed with heaven — aware of
myself, a consciousness forced on me by
these things — I feel that thought must yet
grow larger and correspond in magnitude of
conception to these. But these cannot con-
tent me, these Titanic things of sea, and
sun, and profundity ; I feel that my thought
is stronger than they are. I burn life like
a torch. The hot light shot back from the
sea scorches my cheek — my life is burning
in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a
larger life. No thought which I have ever
had has satisfied my soul.

CHAPTER VII

MY strength is not enough to fulfil my
desire; if I had the strength of the ocean,
and of the earth, the burning vigour of the
sun implanted in my limbs, it would hardly
suffice to gratify the measureless desire of
life which possesses me. I have often walked
the day long over the sward, and, compelled
to pause, at length, in my weariness, I was
full of the same eagerness with which I
started. The sinews would obey no longer,
but the will was the same. My frame could
never take the violent exertion my heart
demanded. Labour of body was like meat
and drink to me. Over the open hills, up
the steep ascents, mile after mile, there was

deep enjoyment in the long-drawn breath,
ill

THE STORY OF MY HEART 119

the spring of the foot, in the act of rapid
movement. Never have I had enough of
it; I wearied long before I was satisfied,
and weariness did not bring a cessation of
desire; the thirst was still there.

I rowed, I used the axe, I split tree-
trunks with wedges; my arms tired, but
my spirit remained fresh and chafed against
the physical weariness. My arms were not
strong enough to satisfy me with the axe, or
wedges, or oars. There was delight in the
moment, but it was not enough. I swam,
and what is more delicious than swimming?
It is exercise and luxury at once. But I
could not swim far enough ; I was always dis-
satisfied with myself on leaving the water.
Nature has not given me a great frame, and
had it done so I should still have longed for
more. I was out of doors all day, and often
half the night; still I wanted more sunshine,
more air, the hours were too short. I feel

120 THE STORY OF MY HEART

this even more now than in the violence of
early youth: the hours are too short, the
day should be sixty hours long. Slumber,
too, is abbreviated and restricted ; forty hours
of night and sleep would not be too much.
So little can be accomplished in the longest
summer day, so little rest and new force
is accumulated in a short eight hours of
sleep.

I live by the sea now; I can see nothing
of it in a day; why, I do but get a breath
of it, and the sun sinks before I have well
begun to think. Life is so little and so
mean. I dream sometimes backwards of the
ancient times. If I could have the bow of
Ninus, and the earth full of wild bulls and
lions, to hunt them down, there would be rest
in that. To shoot with a gun is nothing; a
mere touch discharges it. Give me a bow,
that I may enjoy the delight of feeling my-
self draw the string and the strong wood

THE STORY OF MY HEART 121

bending, that I may see the rush of the
arrow, and the broad head bury itself deep
in shaggy hide. Give me an iron mace that
I may crush the savage beast and hammer
him down. A spear to thrust through with, so
that I may feel the long blade enter and the
push of the shaft. The unwearied strength
of Ninus to hunt unceasingly in the fierce
sun. Still I should desire greater strength
and a stouter bow, wilder creatures to com-
bat. The intense life of the senses, there is
never enough for them. I envy Semiramis ;
I would have been ten times Semiramis. I
envy Nero, because of the great concourse
of beauty he saw. I should like to be loved
by every beautiful woman on earth, from
the swart Nubian to the white and divine
Greek.

Wine is pleasant and meat refreshing;
but though I own with absolute honesty that
I like them, these are the least of all. Of

122 THE STORY OF MY HEART

these two only have I ever had enough.
The vehemence of exertion, the vehemence
of the spear, the vehemence of sunlight and
life, the insatiate desire of insatiate Semi-
ramis, the still more insatiate desire of love,
divine and beautiful, the uncontrollable adora-
tion of beauty, these — these : give me these
in greater abundance than was ever known to
man or woman. The strength of Hercules,
the fulness of the senses, the richness of
life, would not in the least impair my desire
of soul-life. On the reverse, with every
stronger beat of the pulse my desire of soul-
life would expand. So it has ever been
with me; in hard exercise, in sensuous plea-
sure, in the embrace of the sunlight, even
in the drinking of a glass of wine, my heart
has been lifted the higher towards perfection
of soul. Fulness of physical life causes a
deeper desire of soul-life.

Let me be physically perfect, in shape,

THE STORY OF MY HEART 123

vigour, and movement My frame, naturally
slender, will not respond to labour, and in-
crease in proportion to effort, nor will expo-
sure harden a delicate skin. It disappoints
me so far, but my spirit rises with the effort,
and my thought opens. This is the only
profit of frost, the pleasure of winter, to
conquer cold, and to feel braced and
strengthened by that whose province it is
to wither and destroy, making of cold, life's
enemy, life's renewer. The black north wind
hardens the resolution as steel is tempered in
ice-water. It is a sensual joy, as sensuous as
the warm embrace of the sunlight, but fulness
of physical life ever brings to me a more
eager desire of soul-life.

Splendid it is to feel the boat rise to
the roller, or forced through by the sail to
shear the foam aside like a share; splendid
to undulate as the chest lies on the wave,
swimming, the brimming ocean round : then

124 THE STORY OF MY HEART

I know and feel its deep strong tide, its im-
mense fulness, and the sun glowing over;
splendid to climb the steep green hill : in
these I feel myself, I drink the exquisite joy
of the senses, and my soul lifts itself with
them. It is beautiful even to watch a fine
horse gallop, the long stride, the rush of the
wind as he passes — my heart beats quicker
to the thud of the hoofs, and I feel his
strength. Gladly would I have the strength
of the Tartar stallion roaming the wild
steppe; that very strength, what vehemence
of soul-thought would accompany it. But
I should like it, too, for itself. For I
believe, with all my heart, in the body and
the flesh, and believe that it should be in-
creased and made more beautiful by every
means. I believe — I do more than think —
I believe it to be a sacred duty, incumbent
upon every one, man and woman, to add to
and encourage their physical life, by exercise,

THE STORY OF MY HEART 125

and in every manner. A sacred duty each
towards himself, and each towards the whole
of the human race. Each one of us should
do some little part for the physical good of
the race — health, strength, vigour. There is
no harm therein to the soul : on the con-
trary, those who stunt their physical life are
most certainly stunting their souls.

I believe all manner of asceticism to be
the vilest blasphemy — blasphemy towards the
whole of the human race. I believe in
the flesh and the body, which is worthy of
worship — to see a perfect human body un-
veiled causes a sense of worship. The ascetics
are the only persons who are impure. In-
crease of physical beauty is attended by in-
crease of soul beauty. The soul is the higher
even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly
perfect.

It is in myself that I desire increase,
profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and

ia6 THE STORY OF MY HEART

soul. The surroundings, the clothes, the
dwelling, the social status, the circumstances
are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor
of the room be bare, let the furniture be a
plank table, the bed a mere pallet. Let the
house be plain and simple, but in the midst
of air and light. These are enough — a cave
would be enough; in a warmer climate the
open air would suffice. Let me be furnished
in myself with health, safety, strength, the
perfection of physical existence ; let my mind
be furnished with highest thoughts of soul-
life. Let me be in myself myself fully.
The pageantry of power, the still more foolish
pageantry of wealth, the senseless precedence
of place; words fail me to express my utter
contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions.
Let me be in myself myself fully, and those
I love equally so.

It is enough to lie on the sward in the
shadow of green boughs, to listen to the songs

THE STORY OF MY HEART 127

of summer, to drink in the sunlight, the air,
the flowers, the sky, the beauty of all. Or
upon the hill-tops to watch the white clouds
rising over the curved hill-lines, their shadows
descending the slope. Or on the beach to ,
listen to the sweet sigh as the smooth sea
runs up and recedes. It is lying beside the
immortals, in-drawing the life of the ocean,
the earth, and the sun.

I want to be always in company with
these, with earth, and sun, and sea, and stars
by night. The pettiness of house-life — chairs
and tables — and the pettiness of observances,
the petty necessity of useless labour, useless
because productive of nothing, chafe me the
year through. I want to be always in com-
pany with the sun, and sea, and earth.
These, and the stars by night, are my natural
companions.

My heart looks back and sympathises
with all the joy and life of ancient time.

iz8 THE STORY OF MY HEART

With the circling dance burned in still
attitude on the vase; with the chase and
the hunter eagerly pursuing, whose javelin
trembles to be thrown; with the extreme
fury of feeling, the whirl of joy in the
warriors from Marathon to the last battle of
Rome, not with the slaughter, but with the
passion — the life in the passion; with the
garlands and the flowers; with all the breath-
ing busts that have panted beneath the sun.
O beautiful human life! Tears come in my
eyes as I think of it. So beautiful, so in-
expressibly beautiful !

So deep is the passion of life that, if it
were possible to live again, it must be ex-
quisite to die pushing the eager breast against
the sword. In the flush of strength to face
the sharp pain joyously, and laugh in the last
glance of the sun — if only to live again, now
on earth, were possible. So subtle is the
chord of life that sometimes to watch troops

THE STORY OF MY HEART 129

marching in rhythmic order, undulating along
the column as the feet are lifted, brings tears
in my eyes. Yet could I have in my own
heart all the passion, the love and joy, burned
in the breasts that have panted, breathing
deeply, since the hour of Ilion, yet still I
should desire more. How willingly I would
strew the paths of all with flowers; how
beautiful a delight to make the world joyous !
The song should never be silent, the dance
never still, the laugh should sound like water
which runs for ever.

I would submit to a severe discipline, and
to go without many things cheerfully, for the
good and happiness of the human race in the
future. Each one of us should do some-
thing, however small, towards that great end.
At the present time the labour of our prede-
cessors in this country, in all other countries
of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live —
that is, we snatch an existence — and our

130 THE STORY OF MY HEART

works become nothing. The piling up of
fortunes, the building of cities, the establish-
ment of immense commerce, ends in a cipher.
These objects are so outside my idea that I
cannot understand them, and look upon the
struggle in amazement. Not even the pres-
sure of poverty can force upon me an under-
standing of, and sympathy with, these things.
It is the human being as the human being
of whom I think. That the human being as
the human being, nude — apart altogether
from money, clothing, houses, properties —
should enjoy greater health, strength, safety,
beauty, and happiness, I would gladly agree
to a discipline like that of Sparta. The
Spartan method did produce the finest race
of men, and Sparta was famous in antiquity
for the most beautiful women. So far, there-
fore, it fits exactly to my ideas.

No science of modern times has yet dis-
covered a plan to meet the requirements of

THE STORY OF MY HEART 131

the millions who live now, no plan by which
they might attain similar physical proportion.
Some increase of longevity, some slight im-
provement in the general health is promised,
and these are great things, but far, far be-
neath the ideal. Probably the whole mode
of thought of the nations must be altered
before physical progress is possible. Not
while money, furniture, affected show and the
pageantry of wealth are the ambitions of the
multitude can the multitude become ideal in
form. When the ambition of the multitude
is fixed on the ideal of form and beauty, then
that ideal will become immediately possible,
and a marked advance towards it could be
made in three generations. Glad, indeed,
should I be to discover something that would
help towards this end.

How pleasant it would be each day to
think, To-day I have done something that
will tend to render future generations more

132 THE STORY OF MY HEART

happy. The very thought would make this
hour sweeter. It is absolutely necessary that
something of this kind should be discovered.
First, we must lay down the axiom that as
yet nothing has been found; we have nothing
to start with; all has to be begun afresh.
All courses or methods of human life have
hitherto been failures. Some course of life is
needed based on things that are, irrespective
of tradition. The physical ideal must be kept
steadily in view.

CHAPTER VIII

AN enumeration of the useless would almost
be an enumeration of everything hitherto
pursued. For instance, to go back as far as
possible, the study and labour expended on
Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, which con-
tain nothing but doubtful, because laudatory
history, invocations to idols, and similar
matters : all these labours are in vain. Take
a broom and sweep the papyri away into
the dust. The Assyrian terra-cotta tablets,
some recording fables, and some even sadder
— contracts between men whose bodies were
dust twenty centuries since — take a hammer
and demolish them. Set a battery to beat
down the pyramids, and a mind-battery to
destroy the deadening influence of tradition.

»33

134 THE STORY OF MY HEART

The Greek statue lives to this day, and has
the highest use of all, the use of true beauty.
The Greek and Roman philosophers have
the value of furnishing the mind with material
to think from. Egyptian and Assyrian, medi-
aeval and eighteenth-century culture, mis-
called, are all alike mere dust, and absolutely
useless.

There is a mass of knowledge so called at
the present day equally useless, and nothing
but an encumbrance. We are forced by
circumstances to become familiar with it,
but the time expended on it is lost. No
physical ideal — far less any soul-ideal — will
ever be reached by it. In a recent genera-
tion erudition in the text of the classics was
considered the most honourable of pursuits;
certainly nothing could be less valuable. In
our own generation, another species of erudi-
tion is lauded — erudition in the laws of
matter — which, in itself, is but one degree

THE STORY OF MY HEART 135

better. The study of matter for matter's sake
is despicable; if any can turn that study to
advance the ideal of life, it immediately be-
comes most valuable. But not without the
human ideal. It is nothing to me if the
planets revolve around the sun, or the sun
around the earth, unless I can thereby gather
an increase of body or mind. As the con-
ception of the planets revolving around the
sun, the present astronomical conception of
the heavens, is distinctly grander than that of
Ptolemy, it is therefore superior, and a gain
to the human mind. So with other sciences,
not immediately useful, yet if they furnish
the mind with material of thought, they are
an advance.

But not in themselves — only in conjunc-
tion with the human ideal. Once let that
slip out of the thought, and science is of no
more use than the invocations in the Egyptian
papyri. The world would be the gainer if

136 THE STORY OF MY HEART

the Nile rose and swept away pyramid and
tomb, sarcophagus, papyri, and inscription;
for it seems as if most of the superstitions
which still to this hour, in our own country,
hold minds in their sway, originated in
Egypt. The world would be the gainer if a
Nile flood of new thought arose and swept
away the past, concentrating the effort of all
the races of the earth upon man's body, that
it might reach an ideal of shape, and health,
and happiness.

Nothing is of any use unless it gives me
a stronger body and mind, a more beautiful
body, a happy existence, and a soul-life now.
The last phase of philosophy is equally use-
less with the rest. The belief that the human
mind was evolved, in the process of un-
numbered years, from a fragment of pal-
pitating slime through a thousand gradations,
is a modern superstition, and proceeds upon
assumption alone.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 137

Nothing is evolved, no evolution takes
place, there is no record of such an event;
it is pure assertion. The theory fascinates
many, because they find, upon study of
physiology, that the gradations between ani-
mal and vegetable are so fine "and so close
together, as if a common web bound them
together. But although they stand so near
they never change places. They are like the
figures on the face of a clock; there are
minute dots between, apparently connecting
each with the other, and the hands move
round over all. Yet ten never becomes
twelve, and each second even is parted from
the next, as you may hear by listening to
the beat. So the gradations of life, past and
present, though standing close together never
change places. Nothing is evolved. There is
no evolution any more than there is any
design in nature. By standing face to face with
nature, and not from books, I have convinced

138 THE STORY OF MY HEART

myself that there is no design and no evolu-
tion. What there is, what was the cause,
how and why, is not yet known ; certainly it
was neither of these.

But it may be argued the world must have
been created, or it must have been made of
existing things, or it must have been evolved,
or it must have existed for ever, through all
eternity. I think not. I do not think that
either of these are " musts," nor that any
" must " has yet been discovered ; not even
that there " must " be a first cause. There
may be other things — other physical forces
even — of which we know nothing. I strongly
suspect there are. There may be other ideas
altogether from any we have hitherto had the
use of. For many ages our ideas have been
confined to two or three. We have con-
ceived the idea of creation, which is the
highest and grandest of all, if not historically
true; we have conceived the idea of design,

THE STORY OF MY HEART 139

that is of an intelligence making order and
revolution of chaos; and we have conceived
the idea of evolution by physical laws of
matter, which, though now so much insisted
on, is as ancient as the Greek philosophers.
But there may be another alternative ; I
think there are other alternatives.

Whenever the mind obtains a wider view
we may find that origin, for instance, is not
always due to what is understood by cause.
At this moment the mind is unable to con-
ceive of anything happening, or of anything
coming into existence, without a cause. From
cause to effect is the sequence of our ideas.
But I think that if at some time we should
obtain an altogether different and broader
sequence of ideas, we may discover that there
are various other alternatives. As the world,
and the universe at large, was not constructed
according to plan, so it is clear that the
sequence or circle of ideas which includes

140 THE STORY OF MY HEART

plan, and cause, and effect, are not in the
circle of ideas which would correctly explain
it. Put aside the plan-circle of ideas, and it
will at once be evident that there is no in-
herent necessity or " must." There is no in-
herent necessity for a first cause, or that the
world and the universe was created, or that
it was shaped of existing matter, or that it
evolved itself and its inhabitants, or that the
cosmos has existed in varying forms for ever.
There may be other alternatives altogether.
The only idea I can give is the idea that
there is another idea.

In this "must" — "it must follow" — lies my
objection to the logic of science. The argu-
ments proceed from premises to conclusions,
and end with the assumption " it therefore fol-
lows." But I say that, however carefully the
argument be built up, even though apparently
flawless, there is no such thing at present as
" it must follow." Human ideas at present

THE STORY OF MY HEART 141

naturally form a plan, and a balanced design ;
they might be indicated by a geometrical figure,
an upright straight line in the centre, and
branching from that straight line curves on
either hand exactly equal to each other. In
drawing that is how we are taught, to balance
the outline or curves on one side with the
curves on the other. In nature and in fact
there is no such thing. The stem of a tree
represents the upright line, but the branches
do not balance ; those on one side are larger
or longer than those on the other. Nothing
is straight, but all things curved, crooked, and
unequal.

The human body is the most remarkable
instance of inequality, lack of balance, and
want of plan. The exterior is beautiful in
its lines, but the two hands, the two feet, the
two sides of the face, the two sides of the
profile, are not precisely equal. The very
nails of the fingers are set ajar, as it were, to

142 THE STORY OF MY HEART

the lines of the hand, and not quite straight.
Examination of the interior organs shows a
total absence of balance. The heart is not
in the centre, nor do the organs correspond
in any way. The viscera are wholly opposed
to plan. Coming, lastly, to the bones, these
have no humanity, as it were, of shape ; they
are neither round nor square; the first sight
of them causes a sense of horror, so extra-
human are they in shape; there is no balance
of design in them. These are very brief
examples, but the whole universe, so far as it
can be investigated, is equally unequal. No
straight line runs through it, with balanced
curves each side.

Let this thought now be carried into the
realms of thought. The mind, or circle, or
sequence of ideas, acts, or thinks, or exists in
a balance, or what seems a balance to it. A
straight line of thought is set in the centre,
with equal branches each side, and with a

THE STORY OF MY HEART 143

generally rounded outline. But this corre-
sponds to nothing in tangible fact. Hence I
think, by analogy, we may suppose that
neither does it correspond to the circle of
ideas which caused us and all things to be,
or, at all events, to the circle of ideas which
accurately understand us and all things.
There are other ideas altogether. From
standing face to face so long with the real
earth, the real sun, and the real sea, I am
firmly convinced that there is an immense
range of thought quite unknown to us yet.

The problem of my own existence also
convinces me that there is much more. The
questions are : Did my soul exist before my
body was formed? Or did it come into life
with my body, as a product, like a flame, of
combustion ? What will become of it after
death? Will it simply go out like a flame
and become non-existent, or will it live for
ever in one or other mode? To these ques-

144 THE STORY OF MY HEART

tions I am unable to find any answer what-
soever. In our present range of ideas there
is no reply to them. I may have previously
existed; I may not have previously existed.
I may be a product of combustion ; I may
exist on after physical life is suspended, or
I may not. No demonstration is possible.
But what I want to say is that the alter-
natives of extinction or immortality may not
be the only alternatives. There may be
something else, more wonderful than im-
mortality, and far beyond and above that
idea. There may be something immeasur-
ably superior to it. As our ideas have run
in circles for centuries, it is difficult to find
words to express the idea that there are
other ideas. For myself, though I cannot
fully express myself, I feel fully convinced
that there is a vast immensity of thought, of
existence, and of other things beyond even
immortal existence.

CHAPTER IX

IN human affairs everything happens by
chance — that is, in defiance of human ideas,
and without any direction of an intelligence.
A man bathes in a pool, a crocodile seizes
and lacerates his flesh. If any one main-
tains that an intelligence directed that cruelty,
I can only reply that his mind is under
an illusion. A man is caught by a revolv-
ing shaft and torn to pieces, limb from limb.
There is no directing intelligence in human
affairs, no protection, and no assistance.
Those who act uprightly are not rewarded,
but they and their children often wander in
the utmost indigence. Those who do evil are
not always punished, but frequently flourish
and have happy children. Rewards and

146 THE STORY OF MY HEART

punishments are purely human institutions,
and if government be relaxed they entirely
disappear. No intelligence whatever inter-
feres in human affairs. There is a most
senseless belief now prevalent that effort,
and work, and cleverness, perseverance and
industry, are invariably successful. Were this
the case, every man would enjoy a com-
petence, at least, and be free from the cares of
money. This is an illusion almost equal to the
superstition of a directing intelligence, which
every fact and every consideration disproves.

How can I adequately express my con-
tempt for the assertion that all things occur
for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and
are ordered by a humane intelligence ! It is
the most utter falsehood and a crime against
the human race. Even in my brief time I
have been contemporary with events of the
most horrible character; as when the mothers
in the Balkans cast their own children from

THE STORY OF MY HEART 147

the train to perish in the snow; as when the
Princess Alice foundered, and six hundred
human beings were smothered in foul water;
as when the hecatomb of two thousand
maidens were burned in the church at Sant-
iago; as when the miserable creatures tore at
the walls of the Vienna theatre. Consider only
the fates which overtake the little children.
Human suffering is so great, so endless, so
awful that I can hardly write of it. I could
not go into hospitals and face it, as some do,
lest my mind should be temporarily overcome.
The whole and the worst the worst pessimist
can say is far beneath the least particle of the
truth, so immense is the misery of man. It
is the duty of all rational beings to acknow-
ledge the truth. There is not the least trace
of directing intelligence in human affairs.
This is a foundation of hope, because, if the
present condition of things were ordered by
a superior power, there would be no possi-

148 THE STORY OF MY HEART

bility of improving it for the better in the
spite of that power. Acknowledging that no
such direction exists, all things become at
once plastic to our will.

The credit given by the unthinking to the
statement that all affairs are directed has
been the bane of the world since the days of
the Egyptian papyri and the origin of super-
stition. So long as men firmly believe that
everything is fixed for them, so long is pro-
gress impossible. If you argue yourself into
the belief that you cannot walk to a place,
you cannot walk there. But if you start you
can walk there easily. Any one who will
consider the affairs of the world at large, and
of the individual, will see that they do not
proceed in the manner they would do for our
own happiness if a man of humane breadth of
view were placed at their head with unlimited
power, such as is credited to the intelligence
which does not exist. A man of intellect and

THE STORY OF MY HEART 149

humanity could cause everything to happen
in an infinitely superior manner. Could one
like the divine Julius — humane, generous,
broadest of view, deep thinking — wield such
power, certainly every human being would
enjoy happiness.

But that which is thoughtlessly credited
to a non-existent intelligence should really be
claimed and exercised by the human race.
It is ourselves who should direct our affairs,
protecting ourselves from pain, assisting our-
selves, succouring and rendering our lives
happy. We must do for ourselves what
superstition has hitherto supposed an intelli-
gence to do for us. Nothing whatsoever is
done for us. We are born naked, and not
even protected by a shaggy covering. Nothing
is done for us. The first and strongest com-
mand (using the word to convey the idea
only) that nature, the universe, our own
bodies give, is to do everything for ourselves.

ISO THE STORY OF MY HEART

The sea does not make boats for us, nor the
earth of her own will build us hospitals. The
injured lie bleeding, and no invisible power
lifts them up. The maidens were scorched
in the midst of their devotions, and their
remains make a mound hundreds of yards
long. The infants perished in the snow, and
the ravens tore their limbs. Those in the
theatre crushed each other to the death-agony.
For how long, for how many thousand years,
must the earth and the sea, and the fire and
the air, utter these things and force them
upon us before they are admitted in their
full significance?

These • things speak with a voice of
thunder. From every human being whose
body has been racked by pain; from every
human being who has suffered from accident
or disease; from every human being drowned,
burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up
a continually increasing cry louder than the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 151

thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to
listen to, which no one dares listen to, against
which ears are stopped by the wax of super-
stition and the wax of criminal selfishness : —
These miseries are your doing, because you
have mind and thought, and could have
prevented them. You can prevent them in
the future. You do not even try.

It is perfectly certain that all diseases
without exception are preventible, or, if not so,
that they can be so weakened as to do no
harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents
are preventible ; there is not one that does not
arise from folly or negligence. All accidents
are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all
human beings are capable of physical happi-
ness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that
the ideal shape of the human being is attain-
able to the exclusion of deformities. It is
incontrovertible that there is no necessity for
any man to die but of old age, and that if

152 THE STORY OF MY HEART

death cannot be prevented life can be pro-
longed far beyond the farthest now known.
It is incontrovertible that at the present time
no one ever dies of old age. Not one single
person ever dies of old age, or of natural
causes, for there is no such thing as a natural
cause of death. They die of disease or weak-
ness which is the result of disease either in
themselves or in their ancestors. No such
thing as old age is known to us. We do
not even know what old age would be like,
because no one ever lives to it

Our bodies are full of unsuspected flaws,
handed down it may be for thousands of
years, and it is of these that we die, and not
of natural decay. Till these are eliminated,
or as nearly eliminated as possible, we shall
never even know what true old age is like, nor
what the true natural limit of human life is.
The utmost limit now appears to be about
one hundred and five years, but as each person

THE STORY OF MY HEART 153

who has got so far has died of weaknesses in-
herited through thousands of years, it is im-
possible to say to what number of years he
would have reached in a natural state. It
seems more than possible that true old age —
the slow and natural decay of the body apart
from inherited flaw — would be free from very
many, if not all, of the petty miseries which
/Tow render extreme age a doubtful blessing.
If the limbs grew weaker they would not
totter; if the teeth dropped it would not be
till the last; if the eyes were less strong
they would not be quite dim; nor would the
mind lose its memory.

But now we see eyes become dim and
artificial aid needed in comparative youth,
and teeth drop out in mere childhood. Many
men and women lose teeth before they are
twenty. This simple fact is evidence enough
of inherited weakness or flaw. How could a
person who had lost teeth before twenty be

154 THE STORY OF MY HEART

ever said to die of old age, though he died
at a hundred and ten ? Death is not a super-
natural event ; it is an event of the most
materialistic .character, and may certainly be
postponed, by the united efforts of the human
race, to a period far more distant from the
date of birth than has been the case during
the historic period. The question has often
been debated in my mind whether death is or
is not wholly preventible ; whether, if the entire
human race were united in their efforts to
eliminate causes of decay, death might not
also be altogether eliminated.

If we consider ourselves by the analogy of
animals, trees, and other living creatures, the
reply is that, however postponed, in long
process of time the tissues must wither.

Suppose an ideal man, free from inherited

*

flaw, then though his age might be prolonged
to several centuries, in the end the natural
body must wear out. That is true so far.

THE STORY OF MY HEART 155

But it so happens that the analogy is not just,
and therefore the conclusions it points to are
not tenable.

Man is altogether different from every
other animal, every other living creature
known. He is different in body. In his
purely natural state — in his true natural state
— he is immeasurably stronger. No animal
approaches to the physical perfection of which
a man is capable. He can weary the strongest
horse, he can outrun the swiftest stag, he
can bear extremes of heat and cold, hunger
and thirst, which would exterminate every
known living thing. Merely in bodily strength
he is superior to all. The stories of antiquity,
which were deemed fables, may be fables
historically, but search has shown that they
are not intrinsically fables. Man of flesh and
blood is capable of all that Ajax, all that
Hercules did. Feats in modern days have
surpassed these, as when Webb swam the

156 THE STORY OF MY HEART

Channel; mythology contains nothing equal
to that. The difference does not end here.
Animals think to a certain extent, but if their
conceptions be ever so clever, not having
hands they cannot execute them.

I myself maintain that the mind of man
is practically infinite. It can understand
anything brought before it. It has not the
power of its own motion to bring everything
before it, but when anything is brought it is
understood. It is like sitting in a room with
one window ; you cannot compel everything
to pass the window, but whatever does pass
is seen. It is like a magnifying glass, which
magnifies and explains everything brought
into its focus. The mind of man is infinite.
Beyond this, man has a soul. I do not use
this word in the common sense which circum-
stances have given to it. I use it as the
only term to express that inner consciousness
which aspires. These brief reasons show that

THE STORY OF MY HEART 15:

the analogy is imperfect, and that therefore,
although an ideal animal — a horse, a dog, a
lion — must die, it does not follow that an
ideal man must. He has a body possessed of
exceptional recuperative powers, which, under
proper conditions, continually repairs itself.
He has a mind by which he can select re-
medies, and select his course and carefully
restore the waste of tissue. He has a soul,
as yet, it seems to me, lying in abeyance, by
the aid of which he may yet discover things
now deemed supernatural.

Considering these things I am obliged by
facts and incontrovertible argument to con-
clude that death is not inevitable to the ideal
man. He is shaped for a species of physical
immortality. The beauty of form of the ideal
human being indicates immortality — the con-
tour, the curve, the outline answer to the idea
of life. In the course of ages united effort
long continued may eliminate those causes of

158 THE STORY OF MY HEART

decay which have grown up in ages past, and
after that has been done advance farther and
improve the natural state. As a river brings
down suspended particles of sand, and de-
positing them at its mouth forms a delta and
a new country; as the air and the rain and
the heat of the sun desiccate the rocks and
slowly wear down mountains into sand, so
the united action of the human race, con-
tinued through centuries, may build up
the ideal man and woman. Each individual
labouring in his day through geological time
in front must produce an effect. The in-
stance of Sparta, where so much was done
in a few centuries, is almost proof of it.

The truth is, we die through our ancestors ;
we are murdered by our ancestors. Their
dead hands stretch forth from the tomb and
drag us down to their mouldering bones. We
in our turn are now at this moment preparing
death for our unborn posterity. This day

THE STORY OF MY HEART 159

those that die do not die in the sense of
old age, they are slain. Nothing has been
accumulated for our benefit in ages past.
All the labour and the toil of so many
millions continued through such vistas of
time, down to those millions who at this
hour are rushing to and fro in London, has
accumulated nothing ,for us. Nothing for
our good. The only things that have been
stored up have been for our evil and de-
struction, diseases and weaknesses crossed
and cultivated and rendered almost part and
parcel of our very bones. Now let us begin
to roll back the tide of death, and to set
our faces steadily to a future of life. It
should be the sacred and sworn duty of
every one, once at least during lifetime, to
do something in person towards this end.
It would be a delight and pleasure to me
to do something every day, were it ever so
minute. To reflect that another human

i6o THE STORY OF MY HEART

being, if at a distance of ten thousand years
from the year 1883, would enjoy one hour's
more life, in the sense of fulness of life, in
consequence of anything I had done in my
little span, would be to me a peace of soul

CHAPTER X

UNITED effort through geological time in
front is but the beginning of an idea. I am
convinced that much more can be done,
and that the length of time may be almost
immeasurably shortened. The general prin-
ciples that are now in operation are of the
simplest and most elementary character,
yet they have already made considerable
difference. I am not content with these.
There must be much more — there must be
things which are at present unknown by
whose aid advance may be made. Research
proceeds upon the same old lines and runs
in the ancient grooves. Further, it is re-
stricted by the ultra-practical views which
are alone deemed reasonable. But there

161

i6a THE STORY OF MY HEART

should be no limit placed on the mind.
The purely ideal is as worthy of pursuit as
the practical, and the mind is not to be
pinned to dogmas of science any more than
to dogmas of superstition. Most injurious
of all is the continuous circling on the
same path, and it is from this that I wish
to free my mind.

The pursuit of theory — the organon ol
pure thought — has led incidentally to great
discoveries, and for myself I am convinced
it is of the highest value. The process of
experiment has produced much, and has
applied what was previously found. Em-
piricism is worthy of careful re-working out,
for it is a fact that most things are more
or less empirical, especially in medicine.
Denial may be given to this statement,
nevertheless it is true, and I have had
practical exemplification of it in my own
experience. Observation is perhaps more

THE STORY OF MY HEART 163

powerful an organon than either experiment
or empiricism. If the eye is always watch-
ing, and the mind on the alert, ultimately
chance supplies the solution.

The difficulties I have encountered have
generally been solved by chance in this way.
When I took an interest in archaeological
matters — an interest long since extinct — I
considered that a part of an army known to
have marched in a certain direction during
the Civil War must have visited a town in
which I was interested. But I exhausted
every mode of research in vain; there was
no evidence of it. If the knowledge had
ever existed it had dropped again. Some
years afterwards, when my interest had ceased,
and I had put such inquiries for ever aside
(being useless, like the Egyptian papyri), I
was reading in the British Museum. Pre-
sently I returned my book to the shelf, and
then slowly walked along the curving wall

164 THE STORY OF MY HEART

lined with volumes, looking to see if I could
light on anything to amuse me. I took out
a volume for a glance ; it opened of itself at a
certain page, and there was the information
I had so long sought — a reprint of an old
pamphlet describing the visit of the army
to the town in the Civil War. So chance
answered the question in the course of time.
And I think that, seeing how great a
part chance plays in human affairs, it is
essential that study should be made of
chance; it seems to me that an organon
might be deduced from chance as much as
from experiment. Then there is the inner
consciousness — the psyche — that has never
yet been brought to bear upon life and its
questions. Besides which there is a super-
sensuous reason. Often I have argued with
myself that such and such a course was the
right one to follow, while in the intervals of
thinking about it an undercurrent of uncon-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 165

scious impulse has desired me to do the
reverse or to remain inactive. Sometimes it
has happened that the supersensuous reason-
ing has been correct, and the most faultless
argument wrong. I presume this supersen-
suous reasoning, proceeding independently in
the mind, arises from perceptions too delicate
for analysis. From these considerations alone
I am convinced that, by the aid of ideas
yet to be discovered, the geological time in
front may be immeasurably shortened. These
modes of research are not all. The psyche
— the soul in me — tells me that there is
much more, that these are merely beginnings
of the crudest kind.

I fully recognise the practical difficulty
arising from the ingrained, hereditary, and
unconscious selfishness which began before
history, and has been crossed and cultivated
for twelve thousand years since. This ren-
ders me less sanguine of united effort through

166 THE STORY OF MY HEART

geological time ahead, unless some idea can
be formed to give' a stronger impulse even
than selfishness, or unless the selfishness can
be utilised. The complacency with which
the mass of people go about their daily task,
absolutely indifferent to all other considera-
tions, is appalling in its concentrated stolidity.
They do not intend wrong — they intend
rightly : in truth, they work against the
entire human race. So wedded and so con-
firmed is the world in its narrow groove
of self, so stolid and so complacent under
the immense weight of misery, so callous
to its own possibilities, and so grown to
its chains, that I almost despair to see it
awakened. Cemeteries are often placed on
hillsides, and the white stones are visible far
off. If the whole of the dead in a hillside
cemetery were called up alive from their
tombs, and walked forth down into the valley,
h would not rouse the mass of people from

THE STORY OF MY HEART 167

the dense pyramid of stolidity which presses
on them.

There would be gaping and marvelling
and rushing about, and what then? In a
week or two the ploughman would settle
down to his plough, the carpenter to his
bench, the smith to his anvil, the merchant
to his money, and the dead come to life
would be utterly forgotten. No matter in
what manner the possibilities of human life
are put before the world, the crowd con-
tinues as stolid as before. Therefore nothing
hitherto done, or suggested, or thought of,
is of much avail; but this fact in no degree
stays me from the search. On the contrary,
the less there has been accomplished the
more anxious I am; the truth it teaches is
that the mind must be lifted out of its oU'
grooves before anything will be certainly
begun. Erase the past from the mind —
stand face to face with the real now — and

1 68 THE STORY OF MY HEART

work out all anew. Call the soul to our
assistance; the soul tells me that outside all
the ideas that have yet occurred there are
others, whole circles of others.

I remember a cameo of Augustus Csesar —
the head of the emperor is graven in delicate
lines, and shows the most exquisite propor-
tions. It is a balanced head, a head ad-
justed to the calmest intellect. That head
when it was living contained a circle of
ideas, the largest, the widest, the most
profound current in his time. All that
philosophy had taught, all that practice,
experiment, and empiricism had discovered,
was familiar to him. There was no know-
ledge in the ancient world but what was
accessible to the Emperor of Rome. Now
at this day there are amongst us heads as
finely proportioned as that cut out in the
cameo. Though these living men do not
possess arbitrary power, the advantages of

THE STORY OF MY HEART 169

arbitrary power — as far as knowledge is con-
cerned— are secured to them by education,
by the printing-press, and the facilities of
our era. It is reasonable to imagine a
head of our time filled with the largest,
the widest, the most profound ideas current
in the age. Augustus Caesar, however great
his intellect, could not in that balanced
head have possessed the ideas familiar
enough to the living head of this day. As
we have a circle of ideas unknown to
Augustus Caesar, so I argue there are whole
circles of ideas unknown to us. It is these
that I am so earnestly desirous of dis-
covering.

For nothing has as yet been of any value,
however good its intent. There is no virtue,
or reputed virtue, which has not been rigidly
pursued, and things have remained as before.
Men and women have practised self-denial,
and to what end? They have compelled

170 THE STORY OF MY HEART

themselves to suffer hunger and thirst; in
vain. They have clothed themselves in sack-
cloth and lacerated the flesh. They have
mutilated themselves. Some have been scru-
pulous to bathe, and some have been scrupu-
lous to cake their bodies with the foulness
of years. Many have devoted their lives to
assist others in sickness or poverty. Chastity
has been faithfully observed, chastity both
of body and mind. Self-examination has
been pursued till it ended in a species of
sacred insanity, and all these have been of
no more value than the tortures undergone
by the Indian mendicant who hangs himself
up by a hook through his back. All these
are pure folly.

Asceticism has not improved the form, or
the physical well-being, or the heart of any
human being. On the contrary, the hetaira
is often the v/armest hearted and the most
generous. Casuistry and self - examination

THE STORY OF MY HEART 171

are perhaps the most injurious of all the
virtues, utterly destroying independence of
mind. Self-denial has had no result, and
all the self-torture of centuries has been
thrown away. Lives spent in doing good
have been lives nobly wasted. Everything
is in vain. The circle of ideas we possess
is too limited to aid us. We need ideas
as far outside our circle as ours are outside
those that were pondered over by Augustus
Caesar.

The most extraordinary spectacle, as it
seems to me, is the vast expenditure of
labour and time wasted in obtaining mere
subsistence. As a man, in his lifetime,
works hard and saves money, that his chil-
dren may be free from the cares of penury
and may at least have sufficient to eat, drink,
clothe, and roof them, so the generations
that preceded us might, had they so chosen,
have provided for our subsistence. The

172 THE STORY OF MY HEART

labour and time of ten generations, properly
directed, would sustain a hundred genera-
tions succeeding to them, and that, too, with
so little self-denial on the part of the pro-
viders as to be scarcely felt. So men
now, in this generation, ought clearly to be
laying up a store, or, what is still more
powerful, arranging and organising that the
generations which follow may enjoy compara-
tive freedom from useless labour. Instead
of which, with transcendent improvidence,
the world works only for to - day, as the
world worked twelve thousand years ago,
and our children's children will still have
to toil and slave for the bare necessities
of life. This is, indeed; an extraordinary
spectacle.

That twelve thousand written years should
have elapsed, and the human race — able to
reason and to think, and easily capable of
combination in immense armies for its own

THE STORY OF MY HEART 173

destruction — should still live from hand to
mouth, like cattle and sheep, like the animals
of the field and the birds of the woods ; that
there should not even be roofs to cover the
children born, unless those children labour
and expend their time to pay for them; that
there should not be clothes, unless, again,
time and labour are expended to procure
them ; that there should not be even food for
the children of the human race, except they
labour as their fathers did twelve thousand
years ago; that even water should scarce be
accessible to them, unless paid for by labour !
In twelve thousand written years the world
has not yet built itself a House, nor filled
a Granary, nor organised itself for its own
comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot ex-
press the wonder with which it fills me.
And more wonderful still, if that could be,
there are people so infatuated, or, rather, so
limited of view, that they glory in this state

174 THE STORY OF MY HEART

of things, declaring that work is the main
object of man's existence — work for sub-
sistence— and glorying in their wasted time.
To argue with such is impossible; to leave
them is the only resource.

This our earth this day produces sufficient
for our existence. This our earth produces
not only a sufficiency, but a superabundance,
and pours a cornucopia of good things down
upon us. Further, it produces sufficient for
stores and granaries to be filled to the roof-
tree for years ahead. I verily believe that
the earth in one year produces enough food
to last for thirty. Why, then, have we not
enough? Why do people die of starvation,
or lead a miserable existence on the verge
of it ? Why have millions upon millions to
toil from morning to evening just to gain
a mere crust of bread ? Because of the
absolute lack of organisation by which such
labour should produce its effect, the abso-

THE STORY OF MY HEART 175

lute lack of distribution, the absolute lack
even of the very idea that such things are
possible. Nay, even to mention such things,
to say that they are possible, is criminal with
many. Madness could hardly go farther.

That selfishness has all to do with it I
entirely deny. The human race for ages
upon ages has been enslaved by ignorance
and by interested persons whose object it has
been to confine the minds of men, thereby
doing more injury than if with infected
hands they purposely imposed disease on the
heads of the people. Almost worse than
these, and at the present day as injurious,
are those persons incessantly declaring, teach-
ing, and impressing upon all that to work
is man's highest condition. This falsehood
is the interested superstition of an age in-
fatuated with money, which having accumu-
lated it cannot even expend it in pageantry.
It is a falsehood propagated for the doubtful

1 76 THE STORY OF MY HEART

benefit of two or three out of ten thousand.
It is the lie of a morality founded on money
only, and utterly outside and having no
association whatever with the human being
in itself. Many superstitions have been got
rid of in these days; time it is that this,
the last and worst, were eradicated.

At this hour, out of thirty-four millions
who inhabit this country, two-thirds — say
twenty-two millions — live within thirty years
of that abominable institution the poorhouse.
That any human being should dare to apply
to another the epithet " pauper " is, to me,
the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardon-
able crime that could be committed. Each
human being, by mere birth, has a birthright
in this earth and all its productions; and if
they do not receive it, then it is they who
are injured, and it is not the " pauper " — oh,
inexpressibly wicked word ! — it is the well-to-
do, who are the criminal classes. It matters

THE STORY OF MY HEART 177

not in the least if the poor be improvident,
or drunken, or evil in any way. Food and
drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable
right of every child born into the light. If
the world does not provide it freely — not as
a grudging gift but as a right, as a son of
the house sits down to breakfast — then is
the world mad. But the world is not mad,
only in ignorance — an interested ignorance,
kept up by strenuous exertions, from which
infernal darkness it will, in course of time,
emerge, marvelling at the past as a man
wonders at and glories in the light who has
escaped from blindness.

CHAPTER XI

THIS our earth produces not only a sufficiency
and a superabundance, but in one year pours
a cornucopia of good things forth, enough to
fill us all for many years in succession. The
only reason we do not enjoy it is the want
of rational organisation. I know, of course,
and all who think know, that some labour or
supervision will be always necessary, since the
plough must travel the furrow and the seed
must be sown; but I maintain that a tenth,
nay, a hundredth, part of the labour and
slavery now gone through will be sufficient,
and that in the course of time, as organisa-
tion perfects itself and discoveries advance,
even that part will diminish. For the rise

and fall of the tides alone furnish forth suffi-
178

THE STORY OF MY HEART 179

cient power to do automatically all the labour
that is done on the earth. Is ideal man,
then, to be idle? I answer that, if so, I see
no wrong, but a great good. I deny alto-
gether that idleness is an evil, or that it
produces evil, and I am well aware why the
interested are so bitter against idleness —
namely, because it gives time for thought,
and if men had time to think their reign
would come to an end. Idleness — that is,
the absence of the necessity to work for
subsistence — is a great good.

I hope succeeding generations will be able
to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their
time will be leisure time ; that they may
enjoy their days, and the earth, and the
beauty of this beautiful world ; that they may
rest by the sea and dream ; that they may
dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will
workr towards that end with all my heart. If
employment they must have — and the rest-

:8o THE STORY OF MY HEART

lessness of the mind will insure that some
will be followed — then they will find scope
enough in the perfection of their physical
frames, in the expansion of the mind, and in
the enlargement of the soul. They shall not
work for bread, but for their souls. I am
willing to divide and share all I shall ever
have for this purpose, though I think that the
end will rather be gained by organisation than
by sharing alone.

In these material things, too, I think that
we require another circle of ideas, and I
believe that such ideas are possible, and, in
a manner of speaking, exist. Let me exhort
every one to do their utmost to think out-
side and beyond our present circle of ideas.
For every idea gained is a hundred years of
slavery remitted. Even with the idea of
organisation which promises most I am not
satisfied, but endeavour to get beyond and
outside it, so that the time now necessary

THE STORY OF MY HEART 181

may be shortened. Besides which, I see that
many of our difficulties arise from obscure
and remote causes — obscure like the shape
of bones, for whose strange curves there is
no familiar term. We must endeavour to
understand the crookedness and unfamiliar
curves of the conditions of life. Beyond that
still there are other ideas. Never, never rest
contented with any circle of ideas, but always
be certain that a wider one is still possible.
For my thought is like a hyperbola that
continually widens ascending.

For grief there is no known consolation.
It is useless to fill our hearts with bubbles.
A loved one gone is gone, and as to the
future — even if there is a future — it is un-
known. To assure ourselves otherwise is to
soothe the mind with illusions; the bitter-
ness of it is inconsolable. The sentiments
of trust chipped out on tombstones are
touching instances of the innate goodness of

1 82 THE STORY OF MY HEART

the human heart, which naturally longs for
good, and sighs itself to sleep in the hope
that, if parted, the parting is for the benefit
of those that are gone. But these inscrip-
tions are also awful instances of the deep
intellectual darkness which presses still on
the minds of men. The least thought erases
them. There is no consolation. There is
no relief. There is no hope certain ; the
whole system is a mere illusion. I, who
hope so much, and am so rapt up in the
soul, know full well that there is no cer-
tainty.

The tomb cries aloud to us — its dead
silence presses on the drum of the ear like
thunder, saying, Look at this, and erase your
illusions; now know the extreme value of
human life; reflect on this and strew human
life with flowers; save every hour for the
sunshine; let your labour be so ordered that
in future times the loved ones may dwell

THE STORY OF MY HEART 183

longer with those who love them; open your
minds; exalt your souls; widen the sym-
pathies of your hearts; face the things that
are now as you will face the reality of death ;
make joy real now to those you love, and
help forward the joy of those yet to be born.
Let these facts force the mind and the soul
to the increase of thought, and the conse-
quent remission of misery; so that those
whose time it is to die may have enjoyed all
that is possible in life. Lift up your mind
and see now in this bitterness of parting,
in this absence of certainty, the fact that
there is no directing intelligence; remember
that this death is not of old age, which no
one living in the world has ever seen; re-
member that old age is possible, and per-
haps even more than old age; and beyond
these earthly things — what? None know.
But let us, turning away from the illusion of
a directing intelligence, look earnestly for

1 84 THE STORY OF MY HEART

something better than a god, seek for some-
thing higher than prayer, and lift our souls
to be with the more than immortal now.

A river runs itself clear during the night,
and in sleep thought becomes pellucid.. All
the hurrying to and fro, the unrest and
stress, the agitation and confusion subside.
Like a sweet pure spring, thought pours
forth to meet the light, and is illumined to
its depths. The dawn at my window ever
causes a desire for larger thought, the recog-
nition of the light at the moment of waking
kindles afresh the wish for a broad day of
the mind. There is a certainty that there
are yet ideas further, and greater — that there
is still a limitless beyond. I know at that
moment that there is no limit to the things
that may be yet in material and tangible
shape besides the immaterial perceptions of
the soul. The dim white light of the dawn
speaks it. This prophet which has come

THE STORY OF MY HEART 185

with its wonders to the bedside of every
human being for so many thousands of years
faces me once again with the upheld finger
of light. Where is the limit to that physical
sign?

From space to the sky, from the sky to
the hills, and the sea; to every blade of
grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to"
the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth
itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam
by which we are conscious of one narrow
streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my
silent chamber from the window, and atoms
are visible in it; a beam slants between the
fir-trees, and particles rise and fall within,
and cross it while the air each side seems
void. Through the heavens a beam slants,
and we are aware of the star-stratum in
which our earth moves. 'But what may be
without that stratum ? Certainly it is not
a void. This light tells us much, but I

1 86 THE STORY OF MY HEART

think in the course of time yet more delicate
and subtle mediums than light may be
found, and through these we shall see into
the shadows of the sky. When will it be
possible to be certain that the capacity of
a single atom has been exhausted? At any
moment some fortunate incident may reveal
a fresh power. One by one the powers of
light have been unfolded.

After thousands of years the telescope
opened the stars, the prism analysed the
substance of the sun, the microscope showed
the minute structure of the rocks and the
tissues of living bodies. The winged men
on the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the gods of the
Nile, the chariot-borne immortals of Olympus,
not the greatest of imagined beings ever
possessed in fancied attributes one-tenth the
power of light. As the swallows twitter, the
dim white finger appears at my window full
of wonders, such as all the wise men in

THE STORY OF MY HEART 187

twelve thousand precedent years never even
hoped to conceive. But this is not all —
light is not all; light conceals more than it
reveals; light is the darkest shadow of the
sky; besides light there are many other
mediums yet to be explored. For thousands
of years the sunbeams poured on the earth,
full as now of messages, and light is not a
hidden thing to be searched out with diffi-
culty. Full in the faces of men the rays
came with their intelligence from the sun
when the papyri were painted beside the
ancient Nile, but they were not understood.
This hour, rays or undulations of more
subtle mediums are doubtless pouring on us
over the wide earth, unrecognised, and full of
messages and intelligence from the unseen.
Of these we are this day as ignorant as those
who painted the papyri were of light. There
is an infinity of knowledge yet to be known,
and beyond that an infinity of thought. No

1 88 THE STORY OF MY HEART

mental instrument even has yet been invented
by which researches can be carried direct to
the object. Whatever has been found has
been discovered by fortunate accident; in
looking for one thing another has been
chanced on. A reasoning process has yet to
be invented by which to go straight to the
desired end. For now the slightest particle
is enough to throw the search aside, and the
most minute circumstance sufficient to con-
ceal obvious and brilliantly shining truths.
One summer evening sitting by my window
I watched for the first star to appear, know-
ing the position of the brightest in the
southern sky. The dusk came on, grew
deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-
by, other stars less bright appeared, so that
it could not be the sunset which obscured
the expected one. Finally, I considered
that I must have mistaken its position,
when suddenly a puff of air blew through

THE STORY OF MY HEART 189

the branch of a pear-tree which overhung
the window, a leaf moved, and there was
the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make dis-
coveries is like gazing at the sky up through
the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star
shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden
by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some
mental instrument or organon is required to
enable us to distinguish between the leaf
which may be removed and a real void ;
when to cease to look in one direction, and
to work in another. Many men of broad
brow and great intellect lived in the days
of ancient Greece, but for lack of the acci-
dent of a lens, and of knowing the way to
use a prism, they could but conjecture im-
perfectly. I am in exactly the position they
were when I look beyond light. Outside
my present knowledge I am exactly in
their condition. I feel that there »*e in-

1 9o THE STORY OF MY HEART

finities to be known, but they are hidden
by a leaf. If any one says to himself that
the telescope, and the microscope, the prism,
and other discoveries have made all plain,
then he is in the attitude of those ancient
priests 'who worshipped the scarabaeus or
beetle. So, too, it is with thought; outside
our present circle of ideas I believe there
is an infinity of idea. All this that has
been effected with light has been done by
bits of glass — mere bits of shaped glass,
quickly broken, and made of flint, so that
by the rude flint our subtlest ideas are
gained. Could we employ the ocean as a
lens, and force truth from the sky, even then
I think there would be much more beyond.
Natural things are known to us only
under two conditions — matter and force, or
matter and motion. A third, a fourth, a fifth
— no one can say how many conditions — may
exist in the ultra-stellar space, and such other

THE STORY OF MY HEART 191

conditions may equally exist about us now
unsuspected. Something which is neither
matter nor force is difficult to conceive, yet, I
think, it is certain that there are other condi-
tions. When the mind succeeds in entering
on a wider series, or circle of ideas, other
conditions would appear natural enough. In
this effort upwards I claim the assistance of
the soul — the mind of the mind. The eye
sees, the mind deliberates on what it sees, the .
soul understands the operation of the mind.
Before a bridge is built, or a structure erected,
or an interoceanic canal made, there must be
a plan, and before a plan the thought in the
mind. So that it is correct to say the mind
bores tunnels through the mountains, bridges
the rivers, and constructs the engines which
aie the pride of the world.

This is a wonderful tool, but it is capable
of work yet more wonderful in the explora-
tion of the heavens. Now the soul is the

19? THE STORY OF MY HEART

mind of the mind. It can build and construct
and look beyond and penetrate space, and
create. It is the keenest, the sharpest tool
possessed by man. But what would be said
if a carpenter about to commence a piece of
work examined his tools and deliberately cast
away that with the finest edge ? Such is the
conduct of those who reject the inner mind
or psyche altogether. So great is the value
of the soul that it seems to me, if the soul
lived and received its aspirations it would not
matter if the material universe melted away
as snow. Many turn aside the instant the
soul is mentioned, and I sympathise with them
in one sense ; they fear lest, if they acknow-
ledge it, they will be fettered by mediajval
conditions. My contention is that the re-
strictions of the mediaeval era should entirely
be cast into oblivion, but the soul recognised
and employed. Instead of slurring over the
soul, I desire to see it at its highest perfection.

CHAPTER XII

SUBTLE as the mind is, it can effect little
without knowledge. It cannot construct a
bridge, or a building, or make a canal, or
work a problem in algebra, unless it is pro-
vided with information. This is obvious, and
yet some say, What can you effect by the
soul ? I reply because it has had no em-
ployment. Mediaeval conditions kept it in
slumber : science refuses to accept it. We are
taught to employ our minds, and furnished
with materials. The mind has its logic and
exercise of geometry, and thus assisted brings
a great force to the solution of problems.
The soul remains untaught, and can effect
little.

I consider that the highest purpose of

>93

194 THE STORY OF MY HEART

study is the education of the soul or psyche.
It is said that there is no proof of the existence
of the soul, but, arguing on the same grounds,
there is no proof of the existence of the mind,
which is not a tangible thing. For myself, I
feel convinced that there is a soul, a mind of
the mind — and that it really exists. Now,
glancing at the state of wild and uneducated
men, it is evident that they work with their
hands and make various things almost instinc-
tively. But when they arrive at the idea of
mind, and say to themselves, I possess a
mind, then they think and proceed farther,
forming designs and constructions both
tangible and mental.

Next then, when we say, I have a soul,
we can proceed to shape things yet further,
and to see deeper, and penetrate the mystery.
By denying the existence and the power of
the soul — refusing to employ it — we should
go back more than twelve thousand written

THE STORY OF MY HEART 195

years of human history. But instead of this,
I contend, we should endeavour to go for-
ward, and to discover a fourth Idea, and after
that a fifth, and onwards continually.

I will not permit myself to be taken
captive by observing physical phenomena, as
many evidently are. Some gases are mingled
and produce a liquid; certainly it is worth
careful investigation, but it is no more than
the revolution of a wheel, which is so often
seen that it excites no surprise, though, in
truth, as wonderful. So is all motion, and so
is a grain of sand ; there is nothing that is
not wonderful; as, for instance, the fact of
the existence of things at all. But the in-
tense concentration of the mind on mecha-
nical effects appears often to render it
incapable of perceiving anything that is not
mechanical. Some compounds are observed
to precipitate crystals, all of which contain
known angles. Thence it is argued that all

196 THE STORY OF MY HEART

is mechanical, and that action occurs in set
ways only. There is a tendency to lay
it down as an infallible law that because we
see these things therefore everything else that
exists in space must be or move exactly in
the same manner. But I do not think that
because crystals are precipitated with fixed
angles therefore the whole universe is neces-
sarily mechanical. I think there are things
exempt from mechanical rules. The restric-
tion of thought to purely mechanical grooves
blocks progress in the same way as the
restrictions of mediaeval superstition. Let the
mind think, dream, imagine : let it have
perfect freedom. To shut out the soul is to
put us back more than twelve thousand
years.

Just as outside light, and the knowledge
gained from light, there are, I think, other
mediums from which, in times to come, in-
telligence will be obtained, so outside the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 197

mental and the spiritual ideas we now
possess I believe there exists a whole circle
of ideas. In the conception of the idea that
there are others, I lay claim to another
idea.

The mind is infinite and able to under-
stand everything that is brought before it;
there is no limit to its understanding. The
limit is in the littleness of the things and the,
narrowness of the ideas which have been put
for it to consider. For the philosophies of
old time past and the discoveries of modern
research are as nothing to it. They do not
fill it. When they have been read, the mind
passes on, and asks for more. The utmost
of them, the whole together, make a mere
nothing. These things have been gathered
together by immense labour, labour so great
that it is a weariness to think of it ; but
yet, when all is summed up and written, the
mind receives it all as easily 'as the hand

198 THE STORY OF MY HEART

picks flowers. It is like one sentence — read
and gone.

The mind requires more, and more, and
more. It is so strong that all that can be
put before it is devoured in a moment.
Left to itself it will not be satisfied with
an invisible idol any more than with a
wooden one. An idol whose attributes are
omnipresence, omnipotence, and so on, is
no greater than light or electricity, which
are present everywhere and all-powerful, and
from which perhaps the thought arose.
Prayer which receives no reply must be
pronounced in vain. The mind goes on
and requires more than these, something
higher than prayer, something higher than
a god.

I have been obliged to write these things
by an irresistible impulse which has worked
in me since early youth. They have not
been written for the sake of argument, still

THE STORY OF MY HEART 199

less for any thought of profit, rather indeed
the reverse. They have been forced from
me by earnestness of heart, and they express
my most serious convictions. For seventeen
years they have been lying in my mind,
continually thought of and pondered over-
I was not more than eighteen when an
inner and esoteric meaning began to come
to me from all the visible universe, and
indefinable aspirations filled me. I found
them in the grass fields, under the trees, on
the hill-tops, at sunrise, and in the night.
There was a deeper meaning everywhere.
The sun burned with it, the broad front of
morning beamed with it; a deep feeling
entered me while gazing at the sky in the
azure noon, and in the star-lit evening.

I was sensitive to all things, to the earth
under, and the star-hollow round about; to
the least blade of grass, to the largest oak.
They seemed like exterior nerves arid veins

200 THE STORY OF MY HEART

for the conveyance of feeling to me. Some-
times a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment
of the entire visible universe filled me. I
was aware that in reality the feeling and
the thought were in me, and not in the
earth or sun; yet I was more conscious of
it when in company with these. A visit
to the sea increased the strength of the
original impulse. I began to make efforts
to express these thoughts in writing, but
could not succeed to my own liking. Time
went on, and harder experiences, and the
pressure of labour came, but in no degree
abated the fire of first thought. Again and
again I made resolutions that I would write
it, in some way or other, and as often
failed. I could express any other idea with
ease, but not this. Once especially I re-
member, in a short interval of distasteful
labour, walking away to a spot by a brook

THE STORY OF MY HEART 201

which skirts an ancient Roman wall, and
there trying to determine and really com-
mence to work. Again I failed. More time,
more changes, and still the same thought
running beneath everything. At last, in
1880, in the old castle of Pevensey, under
happy circumstances, once more I resolved,
and actually did write down a few notes.
Even then I could not go on, but I kept
the notes (I had destroyed all former begin-
nings), and in the end, two years afterwards,
commenced this book.

After all this time and thought it is only
a fragment, and a fragment scarcely hewn.
Had I not made it personal I could scarcely
have put it into any shape at all. But I
felt that I could no longer delay, and that
it must be done, however imperfectly. I am
only too conscious of its imperfections, for I
have as it were seventeen years of conscious-

202 THE STORY OF MY HEART

ness of my own inability to express this the
idea of my life. I can only say that many
of these short sentences are the result of
long-continued thought. One of the greatest
difficulties I have encountered is the lack of
words to express ideas. By the word soul,
or psyche, I mean that inner consciousness
which aspires. By prayer I do not mean a
request for anything preferred to a deity ; I
mean intense soul-emotion, intense aspiration.
The word immortal is very inconvenient, and
yet there is no other to convey the idea of
soul-life. Even these definitions are deficient,
and I must leave my book as a whole to
give its own meaning to its words.

Time has gone on, and still, after so much
pondering, I feel that I know nothing, that
I have not yet begun ; I have only just com-
menced to realise the immensity of thought
which lies outside the knowledge of the

THE STORY OF MY HEART 203

senses. Still, on the hills and by the sea-
shore, I seek and pray deeper than ever.
The sun burns southwards over the sea and
before the wave runs its shadow, constantly
slipping on the advancing slope till it curls
and covers its dark image at the shore.
Over the rim of the horizon waves are flow-
ing as high and wide as those that break
upon the beach. These that come to me
and beat the trembling shore are like the
thoughts that have been known so long ; like
the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts
that have broken on the strand of mind for
thousands of years. Beyond and over the
horizon I feel that there are other waves of
ideas unknown to me, flowing as the stream
of ocean flows. Knowledge of facts is limit-
less : they lie at my feet innumerable like
the countless pebbles ; knowledge of thought
so circumscribed ! Ever the same thoughts

204 THE STORY OF MY HEART

come that have been written down centuries
and centuries.

Let me launch forth and sail over the rim
of the sea yonder, and when another rim
arises over that, and again and onwards into
an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For
with all the strength of the wave, and its
succeeding wave, the depth and race of the
tide, the clear definition of the sky; with
all the subtle power of the great sea, there
rises an equal desire. Give me life strong
and full as the brimming ocean; give me
thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul
beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by
the shore where the faint blue pebbles are
lapped by the green-grey wave, where the
wind-quivering foam is loth to leave the
lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and
the clear green in which the gaze seeks the
soul, looking through the glass into itself.
The sea thinks for me as I listen and

THE STORY OF MY HEART 205

ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of
the wave repeats my prayer.

Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the
tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines
of foam in layer upon layer ; the wash swells
and circles about my feet, I lave my hands
in it, I lift a little in jny hollowed palm, I
take the life of the sea to me. My soul
rising to the immensity utters its desire-
prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or,
again, the full stream of ocean beats upon
the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart,
the sun burns brightly ; the sense of soul-
Iffe burns in me like a torch.

Leaving the shore I walk among the trees;
a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain
comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-
scented air. The finches sing among the
fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful
it is, in summer days, to see the wheat
wave, and the long grass foam-flecked of

206 THE STORY OF MY HEART

flower yield and return to the wind. My
soul of itself always desires; these are to
it as fresh food. I have found in the hills
another valley grooved in prehistoric times,
where, climbing to the top of the hollow,
I can see the sea. Down in the hollow
I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun
burns as it seems but just above the hill,
and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky
extends beyond the valley, so I know that
there are ideas beyond the valley of my
thought; I know that there is something
infinitely higher than deity. The great sun
burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth,
all the stars of night are feeble — all, all the
cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough
to utter my prayer- desire. My soul cannot
reach to its full desire of prayer. I need
no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought.
If my thought-part — the psyche — were en-
tirely separated from the body, and from

THE STORY OF MY HEART 207

the earth, I should of myself desire the
same. In itself my soul desires; my exist-
ence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer,
and so long as it exists so long will it pray
that I may have the fullest soul-life.

THE END

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