August 5.

Today looking into a narrow dome I saw the seeded planets banded by circles of light whereon they turned.  And color changed into silence at the bidding of the central suns.  And these were the eyes of happy innocence wherein all others died to the Living Light, God being in them by their childishness.  The tide turned yesterday, and today I have spent entirely in eternity surrounded by a host of fair-winged Possibilities, God’s angels to humanity.  Death is glorified by their passage from the future to the past, and we respond by plunging our lights into the Light wherein it dies. Abt Vogler is the musical philosophy of it all.  At my first symphony concert as a little boy, I saw the face of the dying Christ through the wall, and in it the music of the seventh Symphony sang through the naked eyes calling me inward to the Sacred Heart.  This morning and noon at table I smiled at white horizons and in the evening I swam through the Host on my future wings.  We love earth, air, fire, and water now, but the eternal joy of swimming through the Light of God and reflecting His Light in song and silence is the infinity of all poets’ dreams incarnate in the awful speed of Absolute Music.  It is the privilege of laughing into the Eyes of God, those Eyes before which the angels veil their faces.  It is the privilege of smelling the blossom of the Living Rose, of tasting and consuming forever the Body and Blood, of touching the Sacred Knees, and of hearing the Divinity who is Music.  Priests and poets shall swim in the song of his heart, and those who have died for friends will reflect its resolving rhythm.  How I pity Blake his pride, though he was preserved from the pride of humility.  God will let me see more of Him in this life than Blake did, though it is of the most trifling significance to anticipate eternity in poor time, the crippled heir of original sin.  Since it is to be, I wish with all my blood that my will were worthier.

August 6.

A day of happy drudgery reading proofs.  I rode through them in the winds of eternity.  That is the secret of it all,—­to teach us joy.  The human symbol of it is a martyr’s ecstasy, which is in no way sensuous or voluptuous since it has completely forgotten the body.  The Sacred Heart is the Mystical Rose spreading its petals over the Cross of Time.  In Flame and Dew is the first application of an idea and belief that the day will come when anthologies will be books containing the wisdom of the poets on special sciences, such as the science of childhood, the science of love, the science of death, and the science of silence.

August 7.