In a glow with the climb, which at the last had been hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul with the feeling that he was above everything that was, uplifted on the very crown of the earth, he stood in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height, the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of space.

Nobody knew of such marvel but him! Gibbie had never even heard the word poetry, but none the less was he the very stuff out of which poems grow, and now all the latent poetry in him was set a swaying and heaving--an ocean inarticulate because unobstructed--a might that could make no music, no thunder of waves, because it had no shore, no rocks of thought against which to break in speech.

He sat down on the topmost point; and slowly, in the silence and the loneliness, from the unknown fountains of the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled.

Above him towered infinitude, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his eye in a soaring dome of blue--the one visible symbol informed and insouled of the eternal, to reveal itself thereby.

In it, centre and life, lorded the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south and east from the endless heaps of the world, that lifted themselves in all directions.