Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/411

Rh youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;—such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; &hellip; instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one's self great as the universe, and calm as a god. &hellip; What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost."

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:—

The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience.