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.

XIII