Often now, when lost in meditation, he recaptured the experience of "just being." By holding his faculties in poise he could relapse at will into a state of trance through which came a radiant vision. The discordant forces of human nature redistributed themselves, producing a harmony so exquisite and so complex that the mind grew faint in trying to grasp it. The world revealed itself a transcendent instrument on which one's life would be played as a mighty solo, without a false chord.
From one of these trance-like abstractions he emerged to find a keeper staring at him. Paul returned the stare, wonderingly, and the keeper departed. From that moment he was more closely watched. He concluded they suspected him of lunacy.
When the exalted moods passed, he clung to the memory of his visions with the feverish tenacity of a man whose experience has been an alternation of romantic expectations and brusque deceptions. This next adventure, towards which all his instincts, like tendrils, had been reaching forth since the dawn of experience, must not be bungled, lest the future become a descent into nothingness. He sought support in the poetry which had made an impression on his youth, but the odds seemed against success. Poets seldom got farther than passionately envying the happiness of skylarks. The youth whose motto was "Excelsior" mounted high, but in Alpine snows succumbed to his own fanaticism. Paul thought of himself as Wordsworth's youth, "Nature's Priest," lured by the vision of immortality which had attended him as a child. Heaven had lain about him in his infancy; even yet he caught glimpses of an eternal effulgence which gave him courage to defy the life of "sense and outward things." But the poet warned him:
And fade into the light of common day."
