Everything seemed very trivial. The steps leading to the tomb, the
tomb itself, the boundary wall, and the enchanted wood was now no more
than a mere ordinary plantation. There were a few old stones showing
through the leaves, that is all. Marvels never cease; in youth one
finds the exterior world marvellous, later on one finds one's inner
life extraordinary, and what seemed marvellous to me now was that I
should have changed so much. The seeing of the ghost might be put down
to my fancy, but how explain the change in the wood--was its mystery
also a dream, an imagination? Which is the truth--that experience robs
the earth of its mystery, or that we have changed so that the
evanescent emanations which we used suddenly to grow aware of, and
which sometimes used to take shape, are still there, only our eyes are
no longer capable of perceiving them? May not this be so?--for as one
sense develops, another declines. The mystic who lives on the hillside
in the edge of a cave, pondering eternal rather than ephemeral things,
obtains glimpses, just as the child does, of a life outside this life
of ours. Or do we think these things because man will not consent to
die like a plant? Wondering if a glimpse of another life had once been
vouchsafed to me when my senses were more finely wrought, I descended
the hillside; the bird, probably a chaffinch, repeated its cry without
any variation.
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