i had thought all that was over.

i remember my struggles to recover my peace.

i remember how very late one night i went up to the promenade deck to smoke a cigar before turning in. it was a warm moonlight night. the broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. the recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than i had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was manifest about the edge of the sky. one had that sense so rare on land, so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and of interstellar space as of something clear and close at hand.

there came back to me again that feeling i had lost for a time in germany of being not myself but man consciously on his little planet communing with god.

but my spirit was saying all the time, "i am still in my pit, in my pit. after all i am still in my pit."

and then there broke the answer on my mind, that all our lives we must struggle out of our pits, that to struggle out of our pit is this life, there is no individual life but that, and that there comes no escape here, no end to that effort, until the release of death. continually or frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we are things of substance. each moment in our lives we come to the test and are lost again or saved again. to be assured of one's security is to forget and fall away.

and standing at the rail with these thoughts in my mind, suddenly i prayed....

i remember how the engine-throbs beat through me like the beating of a heart, and that far below, among the dim lights that came up from the emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as i prayed and a man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange slavonic tongue.

that voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, i perceived, no more and no less than things in myself that i did not understand. they were out beyond the range of understanding. and yet they fell into the completest harmony that night with all that i seemed to understand....