I HAVE been rereading The Wind in the Willows, always a book to lift the soul and also to open one’s eyes afresh to the sheer beauty of the world. As a child, I remembered and returned to the book for the story and the wonderful characters, and for a quality of kindly enchantment; but, as an adult, I turn to it for the sheer beauty of the prose, the fine detail of the word-painting:

The sheep ran huddling together against the hurdles, blowing out thin nostrils and stamping with delicate fore-feet, their heads thrown back and a light steam rising from the crowded sheep-pen into the frosty air. . .

That’s just the first half of the opening sentence of the chapter “Dulce Domum”, at once the most heartbreaking and heart-warming of the episodes in the book. But, today, as I write this, I came to what I think is both the most central, and yet somehow the most secret and mysterious, chapter in the book, certainly the most beautifully written: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”.

On a first read, it comes so unexpectedly, with such a changing and deepening of tone. In a book that might, on occasion, be in danger of being sentimental, all trace of mere sentiment has vanished; instead, we are brought to the brink of the numinous, offered an experience of sheer awe:

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror — indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy — but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Ratty and Mole have been drawn to a little island by the strange, enchanting call of a pipe that can sometimes be heard, sometimes not; the music itself seems to intensify experience in this world, and yet also kindle a longing for something beyond it. They stand just before dawn in the “august Presence”, and then Mole dares to open his eyes:

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper. . .

The animals are in the presence of the great Pan, and yet Grahame is careful to refer to him only as a “demigod”; and, earlier, they have sung and heard a Christian carol. So, these experiences are not contrary to one another, or contrary to the Christian faith; but Pan is the appropriate manifestation of the Holy for Grahame’s woodland world.

Years later, as a theological student, I encountered Rudolf Otto’s famous work The Idea of the Holy, and Otto’s description of our encounter with the holy as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, of an awe-inspiring majesty that brings us to our knees, brought me back not only to the mysteries of my own faith, but also to the awe that was first kindled in me in a children’s story book about talking animals.