feel able to give of it at
the moment is that it transforms the world upon which it opens. You
look out upon a new earth, literally that. The trees are not trees at
all, but slim grey persons, young men, young women, who stand there
quivering with life, like a row of Caryatides--on duty, but tiptoe for
a flight, as Keats says. You see life, as it were, rippling up their
limbs; for though they appear to be clothed, their clothing is of so
thin a texture, and clings so closely that they might as well not be
clothed at all. They are eyed, they see intensely; they look at each
other so closely that you know what they would be doing. You can see
them love each other as you watch. As for the people in the street,
the real men and real women, as we say, I hardly know how to tell you
what they look like through the first floor's windows. They are
changed of everything but one thing. They occupy the places, fill the
standing-room of our neighbours and friends; there is a something
about them all by which you recognise them--a trick of the hand, a
motion of the body, a set of the head (God knows what it is, how
little and how much); but for all that--a new creature! A thing like
nothing that lives by bread! Now just look at that policeman at the
corner, for instance; not only is he stark naked--everybody is like
that--but he's perfectly different from the sturdy, good-humoured,
red-faced, puzzled man you and I know. He is thin, woefully thin, and
his ears are long and perpetually twitching. He pricks them up at the
least thing; or lays them suddenly back, and we see them trembling.
His eyes look all ways and sometimes nothing but the white is to be
seen. He has a tail, too, long and leathery, which is always curling
about to get hold of something. Now it will be the lamp-post, now the
square railings, now one of those breathing trees; but mostly it is
one of his own legs. Yet if you consider him carefully you will agree
with me that his tail is a more expressive remnant of the man you have
always seen there than any other part of him. You may say, and truly,
that it is the only recognisable thing left. What do you think of his
feet and hands? They startled me at first; they are so long and
narrow, so bony and pointed, covered with fine short hair which shines
like satin. That way he has of arching his feet and driving his toes
into the pavement delights me. And see, too, that his hands are
undistinguishable from feet: they are jus