“This solitary hill has always been dear to meAnd this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most ofThe endless horizon.But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughtsEndless spaces beyond the hedge,An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.And when I hear the wind rustling through the treesI compare its voice to the infinite silence.And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,And the present time, and its sound.Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:And to founder in this sea is sweet to me.”

“The InfiniteIt was always dear to me, this solitary hill,and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,from so much of the ultimate horizon.But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,I create interminable spaces,greater than human silences, and deepestquiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,I go on to compare that infinite silencewith this voice, and I remember the eternaland the dead seasons, and the living present,and its sound, so that in this immensitymy thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweetto me in this sea.”

“When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.”

“I am not without you, that you are with me from the moment I wake until the moment I fall asleep, that it's you when the wind caresses me, that it's your voice I hear in the silence, you whom I see when I close my eyes, you who make me laugh and sing when I know no one else is around.”

“My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?”

“And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains.I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!”