To-day is one of those warm, hushed days when it is possible to think of things as they are,--when ocean, peak, and plain seem no more real than the arching of blue emptiness above them. All is mirage,--my physical self, and the sunlit road, and the slow rippling of the grain under a sleepy wind, and the thatched roofs beyond the haze of the rice-fields, and the blue crumpling of the naked hills behind everything. I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted,--haunted by the prodigious luminous Spectre of the World.

There are men and women working in those

fields. Colored moving shadows they are; and the earth under them--out of which they rose, and back to which they will go -is equally shadow. Only the Forces behind the shadow, that make and unmake, are real,--therefore viewless.

Somewhat as Night devours all lesser shadow will this phantasmal earth swallow us at last, and itself thereafter vanish away. But the little shadows and the Shadow-Eater must as certainly reappear,--must rematerialize somewhere and somehow. This ground beneath me is old as the Milky Way. Call it what you please,--clay, soil, dust: its names are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies, tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it. Dust it is of Karma, waiting to enter into novel combinations,--dust of elder Being in that state between birth and birth which the Buddhist calls Chu-U.

It is made of forces, and of nothing else; and those forces are not of this planet only, but of vanished spheres innumerable.

Is there aught visible, tangible, measurable, that has never been mixed with sentiency?--atom that has never vibrated to pleasure or to pain?--air that has never been cry or speech?--drop that has never been a tear? Assuredly this dust has felt. It has been everything we know; also much that we cannot know. It has been nebula and star, planet and moon, times unspeakable. Deity also it has been,--the Sun-God of worlds that circled and worshiped in other aeons. "Remember, Man, thou art but dust!"--a saying profound only as materialism, which stops short at surfaces. For what is dust? "Remember, Dust, thou hast been Sun, and Sun thou shalt become again! . . . Thou hast been Light, Life, Love;--and into all these, by ceaseless cosmic magic, thou shalt many times be turned again!"

For this Cosmic Apparition is more than evolution alternating with dissolution: it is

infinite metempsychosis; it is perpetual palingenesis. Those old predictions of a bodily resurrection were not falsehoods; they were rather foreshadowings of a truth vaster than all myths and deeper than all religions.