And ever, more and more, the passion of his happiness increased; he knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. It was as though his Self were passing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming countless as the sand. He was everywhere; in everything; shining, singing, dancing.... With the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering summit to the Sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense, untrodden slopes. About him lay this whole spread being of the flowered Caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. But it lay also _within_ himself, for his expanding consciousness included and contained it. Through it--this early potent Mood of Nature--he passed toward the Soul of the Earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of winning tenderness in its mother, passes closer to the heart that gave it birth. Some central love enwrapped him. He knew the surrounding power of everlasting arms.
"Inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn, Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin, Rend thou the veil and pass alone within, Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn. Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born? Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in? Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin. With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn. The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal; The endless goal is one with the endless way; From every gulf the tides of Being roll, From every zenith burns the indwelling day, And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul; And these are God and thou thyself art they."
The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment all alone.
If O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done.