of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I
suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold,
as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of
cabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his
never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously,
working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and
personal application, certain mythological images. They had shown
themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown
their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought
was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or
mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and
that these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was
certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea:
Henry More's _Anima Mundi_, Wordsworth's "immortal sea which brought us
hither ... and near whose edge the children sport," and in that sea there
were some who swam or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its shores.

III

I had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind
the personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living
and vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had
doubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored
in a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and
perception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the
place of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the
images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there
was, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that
makes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged
their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four
elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a
bird born out of the fire.

IV

I longed to know something even if it were but the family and Christian
names of those minds that I could divine, and that yet remained always as
it seemed impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three
times with clearness and certainty, but it left among all to whom it came
some trace, a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of thought or
perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when