n.

Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. One felt
like walking out of a forest on to a plain--there was not much to see
but one had plenty of light. No, there was not much to see and, frankly,
for a considerable time I didn't even attempt to perceive anything. It
was only the illuminating impression that remained. It remained
satisfactory but in a passive way. Then, about a week later, I came upon
a book which as far as I know had never attained any prominence, the
rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of Police, an
obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character who
was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in
London, away back in the eighties. The book was fairly interesting, very
discreet of course; and I have by now forgotten the bulk of its
contents. It contained no revelations, it ran over the surface
agreeably, and that was all. I won't even try to explain why I should
have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which
the author (I believe his name was Anderson) reproduced a short dialogue
held in the Lobby of the House of Commons after some unexpected
anarchist outrage, with the Home Secretary. I think it was Sir William
Harcourt then. He was very much irritated and the official was very
apologetic. The phrase, amongst the three which passed between them,
that struck me most was Sir W. Harcourt's angry sally: "All that's very
well. But your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping
the Home Secretary in the dark." Characteristic enough of Sir W.
Harcourt's temper but not much in itself. There must have been, however,
some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because all of a sudden I
felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a student of
chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of the
tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of
crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution.

It was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down
imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly
apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their
bizarre and unexpected shapes. One fell to musing before the
phenomenon--even of the past: of South America, a continent of crude
sunshine and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast expanse of salt
waters, the mirror of heaven's fro