than to count the stars.  It is to me now as if I had just been born, and I live in the Sabbath of creation.  Every thing that I see I feel called on to give a name; it has a new meaning to me.  Should this life grow—­what?  It is a singular fact that, although conscious of a more interior and potent force at work within, I am now more quiet and will-less than I was when it at first affected me.  I feel like a child, full of joy and pliability; and all ambition of every character seems to have left me.  I see where I was heretofore, and the degree of externality which was mixed with the influences that I co-operated with, an externality from which I now feel that I have been freed.  It does seem to me that all worldly prospect that ever was before me is gone, and as if I were weak, very weak, in the sight of the world; so I really am.  I feel no more potency than a babe.  Yet I have a will-less power of love which will conquer through me, and which, O gracious Lord, I never dreamt of before.”

In the middle of the above entry he thus notes an interruption, and records a lesson taught by the late New England spring:  “George and Burrill Curtis came in, and I have just returned from a walk in the woods with them.  May the buds within blossom, and may their fruit ripen in my prayers to God.”

He was now, indeed, very near his goal, though even yet he did not clearly see it.  And once more all his active powers deserted him.  Study became impossible.  His mind was drawn so strongly in upon itself that neither work nor play, neither books nor the renewed intercourse which at this period he sought with his old friends in Boston and at Brook Farm, could any longer fasten his attention.  He opens his new diary with a record of the trial he has just made in order to discover “whether in mixing with the world I should not be somewhat influenced by their life and brought into new relations with my studies.  But it was to no purpose that I went. . . .  There was no inducement that I could imagine strong enough to keep me from returning.  Ole Bull, whom I very much wished to hear again, was to play the next evening; and Parley Pratt, a friend whom I had not met for a great length of time, and whom I did wish to see, was to be in town the next day.  There were many other things to keep me, but none of them had the least effect.  I could no more keep myself there than a man could sink himself in the Dead Sea, and so I had to come home.

“I feel a strong inclination to doze and slumber, and more and more in these slumbers the dim shadows that appear in my waking state become clearer, and my conversation is more real and pleasant to me.  I feel a double consciousness in this state, and think, ’Now, is not this real?  I will recollect it all, what I saw and what I said’; but it flies and is lost when I awake. . . .  I call this sleeping, but sleep it is not; for in this state I am more awake than at any other time.”

A few days later, on June 5, he notes that