en for an instant, and yet somehow eternally there.
But the thought that they were persons like himself, with cares,
schemes, anxieties, appeared inconceivable; that was one of the curious
illusions of life, that the world through which one moved seemed to
group itself for one's delight into a pleasant vision, which had no
concern for oneself except to brighten and enhance the warm sunlit day
with an indescribable grace and beauty. How hard to think that it was
all changing and shifting, even while one gazed! that the clear water,
lapsing through the sluice, was passing onwards, and could never again
be at that one sweet point of its seaward course; that the roses were
fading and dying beside him; that the pleasant group on the lawn must
soon break up, never perhaps to reassemble. If one could but arrest
the quiet flow of things for a moment, suspend it for a period, however
brief! That was after all the joy of art, that it caught such a moment
as that, while the smiling faces turned to each other, while the sun
lay warm on the brickwork, and made it immortal!

There came into Hugh's mind the thought that this deep thirst for peace
might somehow yet be satisfied. How could he otherwise conceive of it,
how could he dream so clearly of it, if it were not actually there? He
thought that there must be a region where the pulse of time should
cease to beat, where there should be no restless looking backwards and
forwards, but where the spirit should brood in an unending joy; but
now, the world thrust one forward, impatient, unsatisfied; even as he
gazed, the shadows had shifted and lengthened, and the thought of the
world, that called him back to care and anxiety, began to overshadow
him. Was it a phantom that mocked him? or was it not rather a type, an
allegory of something unchanged and unchangeable, that waited for him
beyond? And then, in that still afternoon, there came to him a sense
that occasionally visited him, and that seemed, when it came, the
truest and best thing in the world, the vision of an unseen Friend, to
Whom he was infinitely dear, closer to Him even than to himself, Who
surrounded and enveloped him with care and concern and love; Who
brought him tenderly into the fair green places of the earth, such as
he had visited to-day, whispered him the secret of it all, and only did
not reveal it in its fulness, because the time for him to know it was
not yet, and because the very delay arose from some depth