d back, was surely the
awakening in my prosaic being of the "poetic thrill"; my sudden amazing
appreciation of the world around me as something alive. From that
moment the change in me had worked ahead subtly, swiftly. Yet, so
natural had been the beginning of it, that although it was a radically
new departure for my temperament, I was hardly aware at first of what
had actually come about; and it was only now, after so many encounters,
that I was forced at length to acknowledge it.

It came the more forcibly too, because my very commonplace ideas of
beauty had hitherto always been associated with sunshine and crude
effects; yet here this new revelation leaped to me out of wind and mist
and desolation on a lonely hillside, out of night, darkness, and
discomfort. New values rushed upon me from all sides. Everything had
changed, and the very simplicity with which the new values presented
themselves proved to me how profound the change, the readjustment, had
been. In such trivial things the evidence had come that I was not aware
of it until repetition forced my attention: the veils rising from
valley and hill; the mountain tops as personalities that shout or
murmur in the darkness; the crying of the sea birds and of the living,
purposeful wind; above all, the feeling that Nature about me was
instinct with a life differing from my own in degree rather than in
kind; everything, from the conspiracy of the gorse-bushes to the
disappearing hat, showed that a fundamental attitude of mind in me had
changed--and changed, too, without my knowledge or consent.

Moreover, at the same time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my
heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized
poignantly was utterly independent and careless of _me_, as me; and
that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would
remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I
become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto unknown to
me, and that I had always depreciated in others and especially, it now
occurred to me, in my friend the old folk-lorist.

Here surely, I thought, was the beginning of conditions which, carried
a little further, must become pathogenic. That the change was real and
pregnant I had no doubt whatever. My consciousness was expanding and I
had caught it in the very act. I had of course read much concerning the
changes of personality, swift, kaleidoscopic--had come across som