XIV

A MIDSUMMER DAY’S DREAM

I suppose that every one knows by experience how certain days in one’s life have a power of standing out in the memory, even in a tract of pleasant days, all lit by a particular brightness of joy.  One does not always know at the time that the day is going to be so crowned; but the weeks pass on, and the one little space of sunlight, between dawn and eve, has orbed itself

           “into the perfect star
     We saw not, when we moved therein.”

The thing that in my own case most tends to produce this “grace of congruity,” as the schoolmen say, is the presence of the right companion, and it is no less important that he should be in the right mood.  Sometimes the right companion is tiresome when he should be gracious, or boisterous when he should be quiet; but when he is in the right mood, he is like a familiar and sympathetic guide on a mountain peak.  He helps one at the right point; his desire to push on or to stop coincides with one’s own; he is not a hired assistant, but a brotherly comrade.  On the day that I am thinking of I had just such a companion.  He was cheerful, accessible, good-humoured.  He followed when I wanted to lead, he led when I was glad to follow.  He was not ashamed of being unaffectedly emotional, and he was not vaporous or quixotically sentimental.  He did not want to argue, or to hunt an idea to death; and we had the supreme delight of long silences, during which our thoughts led us to the same point, the truest test that there is some subtle electrical affinity at work, moving viewlessly between heart and brain.

What no doubt heightened the pleasure for me was that I had been passing through a somewhat dreary period.  Things had been going wrong, had tied themselves into knots.  Several people whose fortunes had been bound up with my own had been acting perversely and unreasonably—­at least I chose to think so.  My own work had come to a standstill.  I had pushed on perhaps too fast, and I had got into a bare sort of moorland tract of life, and could not discern the path in the heather.  There did not seem any particular task for me to undertake; the people whom it was my business to help, if I could, seemed unaccountably and aggravatingly prosperous and independent.  Not only did no one seem to want my opinion, but I did not feel that I had any opinions worth delivering.  Who does not know the frame of mind?  When life seems rather an objectless business, and one is tempted just to let things slide; when energy is depleted, and the springs of hope are low; when one feels like the family in one of Mrs. Walford’s books, who all go out to dinner together, and of whom the only fact that is related is that “nobody wanted them.”  So fared it with my soul.