are alike and equal, for he sees them in the light of infinity. But all are wonderful, and we must not sneer at the stars. … Today writing as a means of expression has seemed to be absolutely futile. Silence is the only active way of praise that I can find, provided that it informs some daily action. My will won again today. Horizons are wonderful. S—— told me that Lionel invited him into his Oxford rooms one evening at sunset and led him to a seat from which nothing lower than the horizon was to be seen. "There," he said, "nothing matters that is below that line." You see he knew that our souls in their beauty are always above it.

August 3.

To watch a grass-blade tapping will teach you wonderful music—the language of the wind. The sunlight running through my flesh in-flames the song of the will. I lost myself tonight in the crowded silences. Joy stays with me now, and if I can only join it to sorrow, the will can then sing simply and freely a continuous song. The turning of the tide is soon to come, and my homesickness for G——ville is transforming itself into a different nostalgia. My planets are rising in song like little candle flames. I wish I possessed their humility. Within me tonight are quiet moonlit waters very full and rich with silent promises of rest.

August 4.

At Mass today Mr. C—— showed a fine courtesy serving with the high humility of a punctilious gentleman. … Today I saw the body of Christ, "infinite riches in a little room." The human body of Christ in its passion is the sum of all our bodies, and it is this truth to which pantheism in its blindness dimly beckons. The saints and pure poets and those who have died for friends are the image of the Sacred Heart, and in them at moments of pure reflection there is naked light and the vision which is insupportable. Hence in the greatest saints the stigmata. All God's lonely ones are the reflections of His pain when they attain to sanctity. And holy priests are the reflections of His Hands. Little children and saints may look into His Eyes and see their own. And repentant sinners may reflect His Feet in their tears. All the births and lives of the earth go to form His Human Body, which is vast as Eternity and radiating with Light from all points and inward to the Heart of Light. To some saints it has been permitted to be the spouse of this body and soul. Magic is white or black. White magic is the offspring of spiritual marriage and is a sacrament. Black magic is the offspring of unauthorized spiritual contacts. My frame tonight is possessed by angels dancing before the throne in a fearfully rapid rhythm. The secret of spiritual achievement is unremitting labor urged without ceasing by a fearful joy. No drama is more vast than that of the crucifixion, and yet I have seen it all in the heart of a strawberry blossom with wounds all glorified in an ecstasy of living trembling light, and heard the beating of His Sacred Heart while universe called out to universe in the anguish of His surrender and all the stars died into the Light of Eternity. The tide has turned.

August 5.

Today looking into a narrow dome I saw the seeded planets banded by circles of light whereon they turned. And color changed into silence at the bidding of the central suns. And these were the eyes of happy innocence wherein all others died to the Living Light, God being in them by their childishness. The tide turned yesterday, and today I have spent entirely in eternity surrounded by a host of fair-winged Possibilities, God's angels to humanity. Death is glorified by their passage from the future to the past, and we respond by plunging our lights into the Light wherein it dies. Abt Vogler is the musical philosophy of it all. At my first symphony concert as a little boy, I saw the face of the dying Christ through the wall, and in it the music of the seventh Symphony sang through the naked eyes calling me inward to the Sacred Heart. This morning and noon at table I smiled at white horizons and in the evening I swam through the Host on my future wings. We love earth, air, fire, and water now, but the eternal joy of swimming through the Light of God and reflecting His Light in song and silence is the infinity of all poets' dreams incarnate in the awful speed of Absolute Music. It is the privilege of laughing into the Eyes of God, those Eyes before which the angels veil their faces. It is the privilege of smelling the blossom of the Living Rose, of tasting and consuming forever the Body and Blood, of touching the Sacred Knees, and of hearing the Divinity who is Music. Priests and poets shall swim in the song of his heart, and those who have died for friends will reflect its resolving rhythm. How I pity Blake his pride, though he was preserved from the pride of humility. God will let me see more of Him in this life than Blake did, though it is of the most trifling significance to anticipate eternity in poor time, the crippled heir of original sin. Since it is to be, I wish with all my blood that my will were worthier.

August 6.

A day of happy drudgery reading proofs. I rode through them in the winds of eternity. That is the secret of it all,—to teach us joy. The human symbol of it is a martyr's ecstasy, which is in no way sensuous or voluptuous since it has completely forgotten the body. The Sacred Heart is the Mystical Rose spreading its petals over the Cross of Time. In Flame and Dew is the first application of an idea and belief that the day will come when anthologies will be books containing the wisdom of the poets on special sciences, such as the science of childhood, the science of love, the science of death, and the science of silence.

August 7.

Imagination being Eternal Life, it shows the blind instinct of language that the word should mean the creation of images. Imagination is the instrument of God's creation in his own image and likeness. Today I came to Petrarch and Dante—the mystics of the supreme elements. To contrast their serenity with Blake's wrath shows the whiter heights. All height is inward through narrow circles to the Central Fire of Silent Love from which the angels shrink in spiral messages of inspiring flame, and toward which humanity aspires in narrowing and advancing circles of expiring flesh. But depth is outward to the hearts of men. Sirius sings to my living stars tonight its light in the music of the ancient winds, telling me of the crucifixion in burning colors of a dying world. Why am I unworthy of an equal death? The blood runs toward it in a passion of harmony. The day is near when my morning stars shall sing their lives out together in praise of their Creator, though it is futile to measure it in terms of time. One is not curious of time if one lives in eternity. Death is then only the fulfilment of our operative desires. I wish that I were one of the tears of God. Joy is for those of good will.

August 8.

I met one of Wordsworth's old men today gathering faggots on the shore. "I have been to all places and cities and I found no one happy on the world, and now I wish me to be dead." … Tonight I bowed in silence under the vault of stars. To be holy is to lose the knowledge of good and evil through "clinging Heaven by the hems." To refuse evil is to refuse the apple (malum) of the Tree of Knowledge. There is no possibility of finding the ideal unless we look passionately for nothing but the beauty of souls, seeing therein God's image and refusing to perceive the clouds of evil. Circles lead to Heaven, but straight lines to Hell. Straight lines are the tangents that "err" from the sphere of the ideal. Miss C—— told me about a little boy who was visiting Italy with his mother. He fell down hill, and stopped before a roadside