I hope that in after days I may sometimes make a pilgrimage to the place where that wonderful truth thus dawned upon me.  I have made a tabernacle there in my spirit, like the saints who saw the Lord transfigured before their eyes; and to me it had been indeed a transfiguration, in which Love and sorrow and hope had been touched with an unearthly light of God.

June 24, 1891.

Yesterday I was walking in a field-path through the meadows; it was just that time in early summer when the grass is rising, when flowers appear in little groups and bevies.  There was a patch of speedwell, like a handful of sapphires cast down.  Why does one’s heart go out to certain flowers, flowers which seem to have some message for us if we could but read it?  A little way from the path I saw a group of absolutely unknown flower-buds; they were big, pale things, looking more like pods than flowers, growing on tall stems.  I hate crushing down meadow-grass, but I could not resist my impulse of curiosity.  I walked up to them, and just as I was going to bend down and look at them, lo and behold, all my flowers opened before my eyes as by a concerted signal, spread wings of the richest blue, and fluttered away before my eyes.  They were nothing more than a company of butterflies who, tired of play, had fallen asleep together with closed wings on the high grass-stems.

There they had sate, like folded promises, hiding their azure sheen.  Perhaps even now my hopes sit motionless and lifeless, in russet robes.  Perhaps as I draw dully near, they may spring suddenly to life, and dance away in the sunshine, like fragments of the crystalline sky.

July 8, 1891.

I was in town last week for a few days on some necessary business, staying with old friends.  Two or three people came in to dine one night, and afterwards, I hardly know how, I found myself talking with a curious openness to one of the guests, a woman whom I only slightly knew.  She is a very able and cultivated woman indeed, and it was a surprise to her friends when she lately became a Christian Scientist.  When I have met her before, I have thought her a curiously guarded personality, appearing to live a secret and absorbing life of her own, impenetrable, and holding up a shield of conventionality against the world.  To-night she laid down her shield, and I saw the beating of a very pure and loving heart.  The text of her talk was that we should never allow ourselves to believe in our limitations, because they did not really exist.  I found her, to my surprise, intensely emotional, with a passionate disbelief in and yet pity for all sorrow and suffering.  She appealed to me to take up Christian Science—­“not to read or talk about it,” she said; “that is no use:  it is a life, not a theory; just accept it, and live by it, and you will find it true.”