They were fleeting as one of the glimmering or golden visions one
had of the soul in nature, glimpses of its remote and brooding spirit.
Here, with the sun hot on his face, a cuckoo calling from a thorn tree,
and in the air the honey savour of gorse--here among the little fronds
of the young fern, the starry blackthorn, while the bright clouds
drifted by high above the hills and dreamy valleys here and now was
such a glimpse. But in a moment it would pass--as the face of Pan, which
looks round the corner of a rock, vanishes at your stare. And suddenly
he sat up. Surely there was something familiar about this view, this bit
of common, that ribbon of road, the old wall behind him. While they were
driving he had not been taking notice--never did; thinking of far things
or of nothing--but now he saw! Twenty-six years ago, just at this time
of year, from the farmhouse within half a mile of this very spot he had
started for that day in Torquay whence it might be said he had never
returned. And a sudden ache beset his heart; he had stumbled on just
one of those past moments in his life, whose beauty and rapture he had
failed to arrest, whose wings had fluttered away into the unknown; he
had stumbled on a buried memory, a wild sweet time, swiftly choked and
ended.
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