we wonder at the way in which
we then felt. In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still
true; almost everybody must run Atalanta's race and abide by the result.

One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old
acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved
long ago in some time and place forgotten. I think you must have observed,
many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be
strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling
of novelty is absent, or almost absent. You do not feel as if you were
seeing or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that
you knew all about very long ago. I remember once travelling with a
Japanese boy into a charming little country town in Shikoku--and scarcely
had we entered the main street, than he cried out: "Oh, I have seen this
place before!" Of course he had not seen it before; he was from Osaka and
had never left the great city until then. But the pleasure of his new
experience had given him this feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar.
I do not pretend to explain this familiarity with the new--it is a great
mystery still, just as it was a great mystery to the Roman Cicero. But
almost everybody that has been in love has probably had the same feeling
during a moment or two--the feeling "I have known that woman before,"
though the where and the when are mysteries. Some of the modern poets have
beautifully treated this feeling. The best example that I can give you is
the exquisite lyric by Rossetti entitled "Sudden Light."

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our loves restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

I think you will acknowledge that this is very pretty; and the same poet
has treated the idea equally well in other poems of a more complicated
kind. But another poet of the period was haunted even more than Rossetti
by this idea--Arthur O'Shaughnessy. Like Rossetti he was a great lover,
and very unfo