An extract from Lilith by George MacDonald

A wondrous change had passed upon the world, or was it not rather that a change more marvellous had taken place in us? Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass, was perfectly visible - either by light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out of our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow, all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling idea - the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out.

My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm were at length atoned, at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me.

To be aware of a thing, was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home - was to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me - sense after sense indescribable, because no correspondent words, no likeness or imaginations exist wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed - yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive - was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors!

When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet tintinning, myself in the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which the groud-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves, yet was the joy ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.

Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed, went out a sigh of thanksgiving....