d almost as if they were living things. No
naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of
discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful,
and more loitering eye. He found even fairly common things in Europe, as
Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed with
service and charged with accumulated messages."

He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the
tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some
wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.

In _The Sense of the Past_, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance,
in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house,
but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the
family portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed. It is a
story of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in
which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania. It is the kind
of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here it
is all delicate--a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph,
though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling
about him--something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and
in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own
time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out--doubly
fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is
published along with the story. In the latter we see the author groping
for his story, almost like a medium in a trance. Like a medium, he one
moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say,
fairly pounces on a certainty. No artist ever cried with louder joy at
the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand. Thus, at one
moment, the author announces:--

The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I
seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of
possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the
muchness with which they threaten me.

At a moment of less illumination he writes:--

There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the
sense of something like _this_, a bit difficult to put, though
entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip
of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but
another admirable twist