The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail tenement—­for did I not actually see her spirit and the very soul of her in those eyes?—­was the last of the unforgotten experiences I had at that place which had startled and repelled me with its ugliness.

But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any—­the experience of a day of days, one of those rare days when nature appears to us spiritualized and is no longer nature, when that which had transfigured this visible world is in us too, and it becomes possible to believe—­it is almost a conviction—­that the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in one among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all things.  In such moments it is possible to go beyond even the most advanced of the modern physicists who hold that force alone exists, that matter is but a disguise, a shadow and delusion; for we may add that force itself—­that which we call force or energy—­is but a semblance and shadow of the universal soul.

The change in the weather was not sudden; the furious winds dropped gradually; the clouds floated higher in the heavens, and were of a lighter grey; there were wider breaks in them, showing the lucid blue beyond; and the sea grew quieter.  It had raved and roared too long, beating against the iron walls that held it back, and was now spent and fallen into an uneasy sleep, but still moved uneasily and moaned a little.  Then all at once summer returned, coming like a thief in the night, for when it was morning the sun rose in splendour and power in a sky without a cloud on its vast azure expanse, on a calm sea with no motion but that scarcely perceptible rise and fall as of one that sleeps.  As the sun rose higher the air grew warmer until it was full summer heat, but although a “visible heat,” it was never oppressive; for all that day we were abroad, and as the tide ebbed a new country that was neither earth nor sea was disclosed, an infinite expanse of pale yellow sand stretching away on either side, and further and further out until it mingled and melted into the sparkling water and faintly seen line of foam on the horizon.  And over all—­the distant sea, the ridge of low dunes marking where the earth ended and the flat, yellow expanse between—­there brooded a soft bluish silvery haze.  A haze that blotted nothing out, but blended and interfused them all until earth and air and sea and sands were scarcely distinguishable.  The effect, delicate, mysterious, unearthly, cannot be described.

Ethereal gauze . . . 
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye . . .

                            Sun dust,

Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
Ethereal estuary, frith of light. . . . 
Bird of the sun, transparent winged.