but it is nevertheless vague and shadowy, and you might have difficulty in telling afterwards all the objects you have seen.  This resembles a mental image in point of clearness.  The waking vision is like what one sees in the open street in broad daylight, when every object is distinctly impressed on the memory.  The two kinds of imagery differ also as regards voluntariness, the image being entirely subservient to the will, the visions entirely independent of it.  They differ also in point of suddenness, the images being formed comparatively slowly as memory recalls each detail, and fading slowly as the mental effort to retain them is relaxed, the visions appearing and vanishing in an instant.  The waking visions seem quite close, filling as it were the whole head, while the mental image seems farther away in some far-off recess of the mind.”

[Footnote 10:  The details and illustrations of four other experiments with the image of a rosebud have been given me.  They all vary in detail.]

The number of sane persons who see visions no less distinctly than this correspondent is much greater than I had any idea of when I began this inquiry.  I have received an interesting sketch of one, prefaced by a description of it by Mrs. Haweis.  She says:—­

“All my life long I have had one very constantly-recurring vision, a sight which came whenever it was dark or darkish, in bed or otherwise.  It is a flight of pink roses floating in a mass from left to right, and this cloud or mass of roses is presently effaced by a flight of ‘sparks’ or gold speckles across them.  The sparks totter or vibrate from left to right, but they fly distinctly upwards; they are like tiny blocks, half gold, half black, rather symmetrically placed behind each other, and they are always in a hurry to efface the roses; sometimes they have come at my call, sometimes by surprise, but they are always equally pleasing.  What interests me most is that, when a child under nine, the flight of roses was light, slow, soft, close to my eyes, roses so large and brilliant and palpable that I tried to touch them; the scent was overpowering, the petals perfect, with leaves peeping here and there, texture and motion all natural.  They would stay a long time before the sparks came, and they occupied a large area in black space.  Then the sparks came slowly flying, and generally, not always, effaced the roses at once, and every effort to retain the roses failed.  Since an early age the flight of roses has annually grown smaller, swifter, and farther off, till by the time I was grown up my vision had become a speck, so instantaneous that I had hardly time to realise that it was there before the fading sparks showed that it was past.  This is how they still come.  The pleasure of them is past, and it always depresses me to speak of them, though I do not now, as I did when a child, connect the vision with any elevated spiritual state.  But when I read Tennyson’s Holy Grail, I wondered whether anybody else had had my vision, ‘Rose-red, with beatings in it.’  I may add, I was a London child who never was in the country but once, and I connect no particular flowers with that visit.  I may almost say that I had never seen a rose, certainly not a quantity of them together.”