Never before had he so known himself! Often had he passed the night in the open air, but never before had his night-consciousness been such! Never had he felt the same way alone.

He was parted from the whole earth, like the ship-boy on the giddy mast! Nothing was below but a dimness; the earth and all that was in it was massed into a vague shadow.

It was as if he had died and gone where existence was independent of solidity and sense.

Above him was domed the vast of the starry heavens; he could neither flee from it nor ascend to it! For a moment he felt it the symbol of life, yet an unattainable hopeless thing.

He hung suspended between heaven and earth, an outcast of both, a denizen of neither! The true life seemed ever to retreat, never to await his grasp.
Nothing but the beholding of the face of the Son of Man could set him at rest as to its reality; nothing less than the assurance from his own mouth could satisfy him that all was true, all well: life was a thing so essentially divine, that he could not know it in itself till his own essence was pure! But alas, how dream-like was the old story! Was God indeed to be reached by the prayers, affected by the needs of men?
How was he to feel sure of it?
Once more, as often heretofore, he found himself crying into the great world to know whether there was an ear to hear.