silence flowing over me, submerging and cleansing me, and setting my soul afloat.  But very soon this purely aesthetic pleasure became also an excitement of the intellect.  An immense curiosity seized me.  I desired to penetrate this lighted labyrinth of space, to climb these shining terraces, to know where these vast roads led, in whose profound seclusion God Himself seemed to hide.  In a very humble way I began the study of astronomy, and although I never got beyond its elements yet my whole life was incalculably enriched by what I learned.  I sometimes felt that of all my neighbours the stars were the friendliest and wisest.  That sense of insignificance, begotten by the pressure of immensity upon the spirit, of which so many men have written, I never felt; my most constant feeling was a kind of gladness which had its root in the conviction of some living friendly Power behind and in the spectacle.  The sense of insignificance, if it came at all, was associated with the vanities of mankind.  It did indeed seem a strange thing that a man whose thoughts could walk among the stars, should bend those thoughts to a mean eagerness for gold, a pride in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill.  In a universe, whose arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the biggest grief are alike infinitesimal.  But when the desire of bigness passes from a man’s mind, humility becomes pleasurable, and immensity is soothing.  I forgot to think of the vastness of the stars; they were for me neighbourly and friendly presences, talking like a wise old nurse to me of things that happened before my birth, and the ancient kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, ‘My old neighbour—­God!’

Neighbourship with the earth also became a vital pleasure and a source of peace.  There was a time when I had a vivid horror of death; and as I look back, and analyse my sensations, I believe this horror was in large part the work of cities.  It sprang from the constant vision of deformity, the presence of hospitals, newspaper narratives of tragic accidents, and the ghastly cheerfulness of metropolitan cemeteries.  To die with a window open to the trampling of a clamorous, unconcerned street seemed a thing sordid and unendurable.  To be whisked away in a plumed hearse to a grave dug out of the debris of a hundred forgotten graves was the climax of insult.  It happened to me once to see a child buried in what was called a common grave.  It was a grave which contained already half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of religion could give it sanctity.  Dissolution met the mind there in more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of indecency and wilful outrage.  But in the wide wholesome spaces of the world, and beneath the clean stars,