sical determination of its own.
When it is with me, nothing can banish it; it pulls insistently at my
elbow; it diverts my attention in the midst of the gravest business;
and, on the other hand, no extremity of sorrow or gloom can suspend it.
I have stood beside the grave of one I loved, with the shadow of urgent
business, of hard detailed arrangements of a practical kind, hanging
over me, with the light gone out of life, and the prospect unutterably
dreary; and yet the strange spirit has been with me, so that a strain
of music should have power to affect me to tears, and the delicate
petals of the very funeral wreaths should draw me into a rapturous
contemplation of their fresh curves, their lovely intricacy, their
penetrating fragrance. In such a moment one could find it in one's
heart to believe that some ethereal soulless creature, like Ariel of
the "Tempest," was floating at one's side, directing one's attention,
like a petulant child, to the things that touched its light-hearted
fancy, and constraining one into an unsought enjoyment.

Neither does it seem to be an intellectual process; because it comes in
the same self-willed way, alike when one's mind is deeply engrossed in
congenial work, as well as when one is busy and distracted; one raises
one's head for an instant, and the sunlight on a flowing water or on an
ancient wall, the sound of the wind among trees, the calling of birds,
take one captive with the mysterious spell; or on another day when I am
working, under apparently the same conditions, the sun may fall golden
on the old garden, the dove may murmur in the high elm, the daffodils
may hang their sweet heads among the meadow-grass, and yet the scene,
may be dark to me and silent, with no charm and no significance.

It all seems to enact itself in a separate region of the spirit,
neither in the physical nor in the mental region. It may come for a few
moments in a day, and then it may depart in an instant. I was taking a
week ago what, for the sake of the associations, I call my holiday. I
walked with a cheerful companion among spring woods, lying nestled in
the folds and dingles of the Sussex hills; the sky was full of flying
gleams; the distant ridges, clothed in wood, lay blue and remote in the
warm air; but I cared for none of these things. Then, when we stood for
a moment in a place where I have stood a hundred times before, where a
full stream spills itself over a pair of broken lock-gates into a