_9th December_ 1892.
I am feeling weak and relaxed after my painful illness, and in this state
the ministrations of nature are sweet indeed. I feel as if, like the rest,
I too am lazily glittering out my delight at the rays of the sun, and my
letter-writing progresses but absent-mindedly.
The world is ever new to me; like an old friend loved through this and
former lives, the acquaintance between us is both long and deep.
I can well realise how, in ages past, when the earth in her first youth
came forth from her sea-bath and saluted the sun in prayer, I must have
been one of the trees sprung from her new-formed soil, spreading my
foliage in all the freshness of a primal impulse.
The great sea was rocking and swaying and smothering, like a foolishly
fond mother, its first-born land with repeated caresses; while I was
drinking in the sunlight with the whole of my being, quivering under the
blue sky with the unreasoning rapture of the new-born, holding fast and
sucking away at my mother earth with all my roots. In blind joy my leaves
burst forth and my flowers bloomed; and when the dark clouds gathered,
their grateful shade would comfort me with a tender touch.
From age to age, thereafter, have I been diversely reborn on this earth.
So whenever we now sit face to face, alone together, various ancient
memories, gradually, one after another, come back to me.
My mother earth sits to-day in the cornfields by the river-side, in her
raiment of sunlit gold; and near her feet, her knees, her lap, I roll
about and play. Mother of a multitude of children, she attends but
absently to their constant calls on her, with an immense patience, but
also with a certain aloofness. She is seated there, with her far-away look
fastened on the verge of the afternoon sky, while I keep chattering on
untiringly.