descend, wrapping its memories of heaven about it like a cloth, and to enter the body, and I knew it as more truly myself than that which began in my mother's womb, and that it was antecedent to anything which had body in the world. Here I must return to those imaginations I had walking about the country roads as a boy, and select from these, as I have done from vision, things upon which the reason may be brought to bear. It is more difficult, for when there is divine visitation the mortal is made dark and blind with glory and, in its fiery fusion with the spirit, reason is abased or bewildered or spreads too feeble a net to capture Leviathan, for often we cannot after translate to ourselves in memory what the spirit said, though every faculty is eager to gather what is left after the visitation even as the rabble in eastern legend scramble to pick up the gold showered in the passing of the king. By the time I was seventeen or eighteen my brain began to flicker with vivid images. I tried to paint these, and began with much enthusiasm a series of pictures which were to illustrate the history of man from his birth in the Divine Mind where he glimmered first in the darkness of chaos in vague and monstrous forms
