m all material sensation
becomes as it were blurred, as near objects become when the eye looks
at the horizon, and gradually escapes from consciousness.

I have tried in the foregoing to suggest a method by which our Window
may be unshuttered; it has necessarily been only an oblique view and
clothed in symbolic phraseology, but those who have been able to grasp
its meaning will now have attained to what may be called a state of
_self-forgetting_, the silencing or quieting down of the Physical Ego;
sight and sound perceptions have been put in the background of
consciousness, and it becomes possible to worship or love the very
essence of beauty without the distraction of sense analysis and
synthesis or temptation to form intellectual conceptions.

We are now prepared to attempt the last aspect of our view--namely,
the description of what is experienced when the physical mists have
been evaporated by the Mystical Sense. Again we find that no direct
description is possible, language is absolutely inadequate to describe
the unspeakable, communications have to be physically transmitted in
words to which finite physical meanings have been allocated. The still
small voice which may at times of Rapture be momentarily experienced
in Music, is something much more wonderful than can be formed by
sounds, and this perhaps comes nearest to the expression necessary for
depicting the vision of the soul; but it cannot be held or described,
it is quickly drowned by the physical sense of audition. As the
Glamour of Symbolism can only be transmitted to one who has passed
the portal of Symbolic Thought, the Rapture of Music can only be truly
understood by one who has already experienced it, and the Ideal of Art
requires a true artistic temperament to comprehend it, so it is, I
believe, impossible to describe, with any chance of success, this
wonderful experience to any but those whom Mr. A. C. Benson, in his
_Secret of the Thread of Gold_, very aptly describes as having already
entered "the Shrine." Those who have been _there_ will know that it is
not at all equivalent to a vision, it is not anything which can be
seen or heard or felt by touch; it is entirely independent of the
physical senses; it is not Giving or Receiving, it is not even a
receiving of some new knowledge from the Reality; it has nothing to do
with thought or intellectual gymnastics; all such are seen to be but
mist. The nearest description I can formulate is:--A wondrous