(The journal now follows, written in a small cramped hand, without paragraphing or division.  I omit the first few entries as purely personal.  Middleton had gone to a group of remote western islands, and these notes are the fruit of his sojourn there.)—­The editor.

July 5.

Yesterday found me on the island with its silences, and last night the host was red and sacrificial and rode on a thunder cloud.  This afternoon the planets go singing through my flesh and my song of praise has widened to the arches of the sun.  The sea is moaning slowly on the sand.  I stripped to the cool salt air for the first time. ...  Walking I found my way out on the long gray dunes.

July 6.

On the dunes today with my mother.  My hand swept idly over the soft white sand, shifting the order of many thousands of starry worlds.  What a chord of music if one could but hear it in its entirety!  As it was, I caught wonderful echoes that would light the beauties of many a sunrise.  The silent man reminds me of Synge in his drifting life and the fires glowing in his eyes.  Today I saw the-beauty of a flower. ...  Some day I shall write a play about the stars.  The action will burn in their seedtime and blow on the winds of Fate with all its ironies. ...  Tonight in the sitting room I heard in my heart the singing of the sands.  It is on the shifting desert, I feel, that we shall discover the secret origin of language.  How the infinitely aspiring music must sound tonight along the dunes!

July 7.

The night before last after I retired I felt that lifted feeling physically which represents the beating of the tides.  Last night it coalesced with the singing of the sands.  At Mass this morning the voices at the Credo thundered out Et Homo factus est in a torrent of living sound.  At the elevation I saw a thin white flame rise from the uplifted chalice and disappear.  It takes a beam of light one hundred and eight years to travel from Arcturus to the earth.  Are we similar traveling beams, and is death merely our arrival on another planet which we illumine?  Today I read aloud on the cliffs from the glories of Plato’s Phaedrus.

July 8.

In the morning I wandered onto the dunes leading out toward Wonder Island, but was driven off by the terns who were nesting. ...  The billows of the wind today mingled in me with the sands and the tide, so that I experienced from a new angle Landor’s “We are what suns and winds and waters make us.” ...

July 9.

My life will see much traveling.

July 10.