phaneity reveals no particular
tint;--perhaps you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard.
But its expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling--like the
smiling of unknown friends in dreams, with infinite indulgence for any
folly, even a dream-folly.... Except in that you cannot permanently
banish it, the presence offers no positive resistance to your will: it
accepts each caprice with obedience; it meets your every whim with
angelic patience. It is never critical,--never makes plaint even by a
look,--never proves irksome: yet you cannot ignore it, because of a
certain queer power it possesses to make something stir and quiver in
your heart,--like an old vague sweet regret,--something buried alive
which will not die.... And so often does this happen that desire to
solve the riddle becomes a pain,--that you finally find yourself making
supplication to the Presence,--addressing to it questions which it will
never answer directly, but only by a smile or by words having no
relation to the asking,--words enigmatic, which make mysterious
agitation in old forsaken fields of memory ... even as a wind betimes,
over wide wastes of marsh, sets all the grasses whispering about
nothing. But you will question on, untiringly, through the nights and
days of years:--

--"Who are you?--what are you?--what is this weird relation that you
bear to me? All you say to me I feel that I have heard before--but
where?--but when? By what name am I to call you,--since you will answer
to none that I remember? Surely you do not live: yet I know the
sleeping-places of all my dead,--and yours, I do not know! Neither are
you any dream;--for dreams distort and change; and you, you are ever
the same. Nor are you any hallucination; for all my senses are still
vivid and strong.... This only I know beyond doubt,--that you are of
the Past: you belong to memory--but to the memory of what dead
suns?..."

* * * * *

Then, some day or night, unexpectedly, there comes to you at
least,--with a soft swift tingling shock as of fingers invisible,--the
knowledge that the Face is not the memory of any one face, but a
multiple image formed of the traits of many dear faces,--superimposed
by remembrance, and interblended by affection into one ghostly
personality,--infinitely sympathetic, phantasmally beautiful: a
Composite of recollections! And the Voice is the echo of no one voice,
but the echoing of many voic