ucted thither, without the
trouble of the journey! Yet we can, like the wise King of Troy, build
the walls of our castle to music, if we will, and see to the fit
providing of the place; it only needs that we should set about it in
earnest; and as I have often gratefully found that a single word of
another can fall into the mind like a seed, and quicken to life while
one sleeps, breaking unexpectedly into bloom, I will here say what
comes into my mind to say, and point out the towers that I think I
discern rising above the tangled forest, and glimmering tall and
shapely and secure at the end of many an open avenue.

II

IDEAS

There are certain great ideas which, if we have any intelligence and
thoughtfulness at all, we cannot help coming across the track of, just
as when we walk far into the deep country, in the time of the
blossoming of flowers, we step for a moment into a waft of fragrance,
cast upon the air from orchard or thicket or scented field of bloom.

These ideas are very various in quality; some of them deliciously
haunting and transporting, some grave and solemn, some painfully sad
and strong. Some of them seem to hint at unseen beauty and joy, some
have to do with problems of conduct and duty, some with the relation
in which we wish to stand or are forced to stand with other human
beings; some are questionings born of grief and pain, what the
meaning of sorrow is, whether pain has a further intention, whether
the spirit survives the life which is all that we can remember of
existence; but the strange thing about all these ideas is that we find
them suddenly in the mind and soul; we do not seem to invent them,
though we cannot trace them; and even if we find them in books that we
read or words that we hear, they do not seem wholly new to us; we
recognise them as things that we have dimly felt and perceived, and
the reason why they often have so mysterious an effect upon us is that
they seem to take us outside of ourselves, further back than we can
recollect, beyond the faint horizon, into something as wide and great
as the illimitable sea or the depths of sunset sky.

Some of these ideas have to do with the constitution of society, the
combined and artificial peace in which human beings live, and then
they are political ideas; or they deal with such things as numbers,
curves, classes of animals and plants, the soil of the earth, the
changes of the seasons, the laws of weight and mass, and then