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.
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