One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved long ago in some time and place forgotten.  I think you must have observed, many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling of novelty is absent, or almost absent.  You do not feel as if you were seeing or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that you knew all about very long ago.  I remember once travelling with a Japanese boy into a charming little country town in Shikoku—­and scarcely had we entered the main street, than he cried out:  “Oh, I have seen this place before!” Of course he had not seen it before; he was from Osaka and had never left the great city until then.  But the pleasure of his new experience had given him this feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar.  I do not pretend to explain this familiarity with the new—­it is a great mystery still, just as it was a great mystery to the Roman Cicero.  But almost everybody that has been in love has probably had the same feeling during a moment or two—­the feeling “I have known that woman before,” though the where and the when are mysteries.  Some of the modern poets have beautifully treated this feeling.  The best example that I can give you is the exquisite lyric by Rossetti entitled “Sudden Light.”

  I have been here before,
    But when or how I cannot tell: 
  I know the grass beyond the door,
    The sweet keen smell,
  The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

  You have been mine before,—­
    How long ago I may not know: 
  But just when at that swallow’s soar
    Your neck turn’d so,
  Some veil did fall,—­I knew it all of yore.

  Has this been thus before? 
    And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
  Still with our lives our loves restore
    In death’s despite,
  And day and night yield one delight once more?

I think you will acknowledge that this is very pretty; and the same poet has treated the idea equally well in other poems of a more complicated kind.  But another poet of the period was haunted even more than Rossetti by this idea—­Arthur O’Shaughnessy.  Like Rossetti he was a great lover, and very unfortunate in his love; and he wrote his poems, now famous, out of the pain and regret that was in his heart, much as singing birds born in cages are said to sing better when their eyes are put out.  Here is one example: 

  Along the garden ways just now
    I heard the flowers speak;
  The white rose told me of your brow,
    The red rose of your cheek;
  The lily of your bended head,
    The bindweed of your hair: 
  Each looked its loveliest and said
    You were more fair.

  I went into the woods anon,
    And heard the wild birds sing
  How sweet you were; they warbled on,
    Piped, trill’d the self-same thing. 
  Thrush, blackbird, linnet, without pause
    The burden did repeat,
  And still began again because
    You were more sweet.