I could carry overflowing happiness now even to New York.  Today reminded me of the sunlight on the roar of Broadway.  God is on the wind tonight, and is beating down my will with his wings.

August 25.

I lay through a night of tempestuous wind with the open window at my head.  I awoke and saw myself face to face in my weakness.  It rained all day. ...  I can hardly bear my love today.  It is a terrific dynamo of silence.  But it will be very long before I shall fulfill my worthiness.  If one could always remember that he is a saviour, and carry humanity with him, his will would be inflexible and every act an exulting humility.  All nature is but a mantle which the wind of my spirit disposes in folds about me, and humanity is the chalice in which I may communicate with God,—­a chalice woven of our singing flesh and heart and brain and will, wherein the will is its depth, the Atlas which bears the Sacred Body and Blood when it is given to us.

August 26.

Sorrow has come at last.  Full moon, and life is at the flood.  The precept of all adversity is of course that the ebb tide of fortune is our flood toward God.  Even the lamp tonight is singing in the room.

August 27.

The experience still turns inward to the heart of life.  I now see the core of it.  It burns, of course, but think of the wheel it carries.  A few days ago I was on the circumference.  Now I have found the center.  A day of rain and wind and exterior disturbances.  But I have found my cenacle.

August 28.

A victory for the will. ...  It is strange that every vital lesson that experience teaches can never be expressed in words.  The past few days have taught me more than the rest of the summer.  There will always be a secrecy of the soul, and what this contains constitutes God’s image and likeness.  Life sings tonight in every atom its marvelous chemistry of change and prophecy.  Nature knows no elegies, since it may never triumph over aught but dust.  But the highest dream is less worthy than the simplest deed, and we must forget the knowledge of good and evil.  I would exchange all the knowledge I have gained for the grace to perform the slightest act of St. Francis.  God has made our opportunity infinite by giving us an eternal standard of values,—­that is all.

August 29.

I am afraid to write further for fear that I shall soon become self-conscious. ...  It is strange that the will did not come home to me as a complete experience before.  I simply had the foreboding of it.  This summer on the 9th of August I heard the Fourth Syllable in its awfulness for the first time, and understood the mystery of the Redemption.  The time has now come to close this book, for the record is complete, and may not be reopened until I redeem my will.

They departed into their own country another way.