The hours in which we come in contact with great souls are always
memorable in our history, often the crises in our intellectual life; it
is the recollection of such hours that gives those bending elms an
imperishable charm, and lends to this landscape a deathless interest.
Chapter XVI
A Summer Morning
I do not understand how any one who has watched the breaking of a
summer day can question the noblest faiths of man. William Blake, with
that integrity of insight which is often the possession of the true
mystic, declared that when he was asked if he saw anything more in a
sunset than a round disk of fire, he could only answer that he saw an
innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord
God Almighty!" The birth of a day is a diviner miracle even than its
death. They were true poets who wrote the old Vedic hymns and sang
those wonderful adorations when the last stars were fading in the
splendour of the dawn. Beside the glory of the sun's announcement all
royal progresses are tawdry and mean; beside the beauty of the dawn,
slowly unveiling the day while the heavens wait in silent worship, all
poetry is idle and empty. It is the divinest of all the visible
processes of Nature, and the sublimest of all her marvellous symbolism.
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