The sublime miracle play is yearly performed in their sight, and they only hear it said that it is hot or cold, that the day is fair or dark! And now there come sudden insights into still larger and more awful truths; a sense of wonder and awe makes the night solemn with mystery.
Who does not recall some starlit night which suddenly, alone on a country road, perhaps, seemed to flash its splendour into his very soul and lift all life for a moment to a sublime height?
The trees stood silent down the long road, no other footstep echoed far or near, one was alone with Nature and at one with her; suspecting no strange nearness of her presence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, and yet in the very mood in which these were both possible and natural.
The boy of Wordsworth's imagination would stand beneath the trees "when the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills," and, with fingers interwoven, blow mimic hootings to the owls: And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call--with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din.

And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill, Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake.
It is in such moods as this, when all things are forgotten, and heart and mind are open to every sight and sound, that Nature comes to the soul with some deep, sweet message of her inner being, and with invisible hand lifts the curtain of mystery for one hushed and fleeting moment.
As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me.
The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth.

Under the wide-spreading branches a boy is intently reading.

He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has learned that to some men the great silent world about him, that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial--a vision projected by the soul upon illimitable space.

On the instant all things are smitten with unreality; the solid earth sinks beneath him, and leaves him solitary and awestruck in a universe that is a dream.
He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said, "The Supreme Being does not build up Nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves." That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms forever, was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last.