The whole method of thought
is so obscure that it is hard to say under what conditions this
takes place. But I allow myself the happiness of believing that the
place and the people of whom I have been so often aware are real
and tangible existences, and that impressions of things unseen and
unrecognised by me have passed into my brain, so that some secret
fellowship has been established. It would be a great joy to me if
this could be definitely established; and I am not without hopes
that this piece of writing may by some happy chance be the bearer
of definite tidings to two people whom unseen I love, and whose
thought may have been bent aimlessly perhaps and indistinctly upon
mine, but never without some touch of kinship and goodwill.
XI
THAT OTHER ONE
I am going to try, in these few pages, to draw water out of a deep
well--the well of which William Morris wrote as the "Well at the
World's End." I shall try to describe a very strange and secret
experience, which visits me rarely and at unequal intervals;
sometimes for weeks together not at all, sometimes several times in
a day. When it happens it is not strange at all, nor wonderful; the
only wonder about it is that it does not happen more often, because
it seems at the moment to be the one true thing in a world of vain
shadows; everything else falls away, becomes accidental and remote,
like the lights, let me say, of some unknown town, which one sees
as one travels by night and as one twitches aside the curtain from
the window of a railway-carriage, in a sudden interval between two
profound slumbers.
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