I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes
upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of
scene, and on reading a certain type of book--I have known it from my
early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything. It is the
sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing
which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching. It
contains within it a vague yet poignant happiness, a rich and unknown
experience. It is the nearest I ever come to a sense of pre-existence;
and I have sometimes wondered if it might not be, not perhaps my own
pre-existence, but some inherited recollection of happiness in which I
myself had no part, but which was part of the mind of one, or of many,
from whom I derive my origin. If limbs and features, qualities and
desires, are derived from one's ancestors, why should one not also
derive a touch of their happy dreams, their sweet remembrances?
The first time it ever came to me was when we were taken, quite as
small children, to a little cottage which stood in a clearing of a
great pine-wood near Wellington College. I suppose that the cottage was
really older than the wood; it was guarded by great sprawling laurels,
and below the house was a privet-hedged garden, sheltered all round by
the pines, with a stream at the foot. The sun lay very warm on the
vegetable beds and orchard trees, and there was a row of hives--not
painted cupboards such as one now sees, but big egg-shaped things made
of a rope of twisted straw--round which on warm days the humming bees
made a low musical note, that rose and fell as the numbers increased or
diminished. I suppose my nurse went to buy honey there--we called it
The Honey-woman's Cottage. I dimly remember an old, smiling, wrinkled
woman opening the door to us, summoning my nurse in to a mysterious
talk, and inviting us to go into the garden meanwhile. The whole
proceeding was intensely mysterious and beautiful. Through the red pine
stems one could see the sandy soil rising and falling in low ridges,
strewn with russet needles. Down below, nearer to the stream, a tough
green sword-grass grew richly; and beyond lay the deep wood, softly
sighing, and containing all sorts of strange scents and haunting
presences. In the garden there was a penetrating aromatic smell from
the box-hedges and the hot vegetable-beds. We wandered about, and it
used to seem to me, I remember, like the scenes in which some of
Grimm's fairy-tales were enacted I suppose that the honey-woman was the
wife of a woodman and was a simple soul enough; but there was something
behind it all; she knew more than she would say. Strange guests drew
nigh to the cottage at nightfall, and the very birds of the place had
sad tales to tell. But it was not that I connected it with anything
definite--it was just the sense of something narrowly eluding me, which
was there, but which I could not quite perceive. There were other
places, too, that gave me the same sense--one a big dark pool in the
woods, with floating water-lilies; it was there, too, that mysterious
presence; and it was to be experienced also at the edge of a particular
covert, a hanging wood that fell steeply from the road, where the ferns
glittered with a metallic light and the flies buzzed angrily in the
thicket.
And there have been places since where the same sense has come strongly
upon me. One was a glade in Windsor Forest, just to be reached by a
rapid walk from Eton on a half-holiday afternoon; it was a wide grassy
place, with a few old oaks in it, gnarled and withered; and over the
tree-tops was a glimpse of distant blue swelling hills. Even now the
same sensation comes back to me, more rarely but not less keenly, at
smoke going up from the chimney of an unseen house surrounded by woods,
and certain effects of sunset upon lonely woodsides and far-off bright
waters. It comes with a sudden yearning, and a sense, too, of some
personal presence close at hand, a presence that feels and loves and
would manifest itself if it could--one with whom I have shared
happiness and peace, one in whose eyes I have looked and in whose arms
I have been folded. But the thing is so utterly removed from any sense
of desire or passion that I can hardly describe it. It gives a sense of
long summer days spent in innocent experience, with no need of word or
sign. There is no sense of stirring adventure, of exultation, or pride
about it--it is just an infinite untroubled calm, of beautiful things
perceived in a serenity untroubled by memory or hope, by sorrow or
fear. Its quality lies in its eternity; there is no beginning or end
about it, no opening or closing door. There seems nothing to explain or
reconcile in it; the heart is content to wonder, and has no desire to
understand. There is in it none of the shadow of happy days, past and
gone, embalmed in memory; no breath of the world comes near it, no
thought of care or anxiety, no ugly shadows of death or silence. It
seems when it comes like the only true thing in the world, the only
perfectly pure thing, like light or sweet sound. And yet it has always
the sense that it is not yet quite found, that it is there waiting for
a moment to declare itself, within reach of the hand and yet
unattained. It is so real that it makes me doubt the reality of
everything else in the world, and it removes for an instant all sense
of the jarring and inharmonious elements of life, the pitiful desires,
the angers and coldnesses of fellow-mortals, the selfish claims of
one's own timid heart and mind.
It came to me for a moment to-day in my little orchard deep in
high-seeded grass: a breeze came and went, stirring the leaves of the
trees and bowing the tall grasses with its flying footsteps; a bird
broke out in a bush into a jocund trill of song, as if triumphing in
the joyful sight of something that was hidden from my eyes. If I could
but have caught and held the secret, how easily it would have solved my
own perplexities, how faithfully would I have whispered it in men's
ears; but while I wondered, it was gone like the viewless passage of an
angel, and left me with my longing unfulfilled, my yearning
unsatisfied.