It was just at sunset that I saw it; and as the sun went down and the colour began to ebb out of bush and wall, the sense of its beauty and grace became every instant more and more acute.  A long train of rooks, flying quietly homeward, drifted across the rose-flushed clouds.  Everything alike spoke of peace, of a quiet ending, of closed eyes and weary hearts at rest.  And yet the sense was not a joyful one, for it was all overshadowed by a consciousness of the unattainable.  What increased the mystery was that the very thought that it could not be attained, the yearning for the impossible, was what seemed to lend the deepest sense of beauty to the scene.  Who can interpret these things?  Who can show why it is that the sense of beauty, that deep hunger of the heart, is built up on the fact that the dream cannot be realised?  Yet so it is.  The sense of beauty, whatever it may be, seems to depend upon the fact that the soul there catches a glimpse of something that waits to bless it—­and upon which it cannot lay its hand; or is aware that if it does for a moment apprehend it, yet that a moment later it will be dragged rudely back into a different region.  The sense of beauty is then of its nature accompanied by sadness; it is essentially evanescent.  A beautiful thing with which we grow familiar stands often before us dumb and inarticulate, with no appeal to the spirit.  Then perhaps in a sudden movement, the door of the spirit is unlatched, and the soul for a moment discerns the sweet essence, to which an instant before it had been wholly unresponsive, and which an instant later will lose its power.  It seems to point to a possible satisfaction; and yet it owes its poignancy to the fact that the heart is still unsatisfied.

XXVI

I once wrote and published a personal and intimate book; it was a curious experience.  There was a certain admixture of fiction in it, but in the main it was a confession of opinions; for various reasons the book had a certain vogue, and though it was published anonymously, the authorship was within my own circle detected.  I saw several reviews of it, and I was amused to find that the critics perspicuously conjectured that because it was written in the first person it was probably autobiographical.  I had several criticisms made on it by personal friends:  some of them objected to the portraiture of persons in it being too life-like, selecting as instances two characters who were entirely imaginary; others objected to the portraiture as not being sufficiently life-like, and therefore tending to mislead the reader.  Others determined to see in the book a literal transcript of fact, set themselves to localise and identify incidents which were pure fiction, introduced for reasons of picturesqueness.  It brought me, too, a whole crop of letters from unknown people, many of which were very interesting and touching, letters which pleased and encouraged me greatly, because they proved that the book had made its way at all events to certain hearts.