DUMB INTIMACIES 



I think, a very curious and a very precious thing. 

 We come into life bugaboo-haunted. Our infan 

 tile souls reverberate the fears of our ancestors 

 and shudder at the dark. But always there is at 

 the bottom of our consciousness an unexercised 

 mastership of soul that breaks loose often in 

 dreams and carries us defiantly against our envi 

 ronment. We walk in fiery furnaces and are not 

 consumed. We wander on fields of eternal ice 

 and are not cold ; we lie down with the kine in the 

 chilly spring rains and feel them not ; we float in 

 the ether without propulsion. To be able in the 

 slightest degree to approximate these experiences 

 in our waking hours ; to look serenely on the 

 grinding wheels of creation without a throb ; to 

 know that all the grades of existence beneath us 

 have been our playground, and are coming up 

 our way, makes the ghost stories disappear one 

 by one. That Nature rightly viewed and obedi 

 ently wooed has this intimation of immortality 

 and immunity in her was Wordsworth s creed. 

 Nature, when listened to rightly, always seems to 

 me to be saying exactly what my old tutor used to 

 say to me : &quot;But why be so impatient? You have 



an eternity before you and an eternity behind 





 you. 



I put it down as the best outcome of my small 

 philosophy, gained in a long vacation, that it is a 

 good education for a man to stop wrestling with 

 Thoughts and get acquainted with Things. Of 

 course, we cannot all be philosophers or even 

 savants. We must go back into the thick of the 



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