laughing group of which he was one had joined hands to receive a
galvanic shock; the circle had dislinked again in a moment, with cries
of surprise and pleasure; but to Howard it had meant much more than
that; the current gave him a sense of awful force and potency, the
potency of death. What was this strange and fearful essence which could
pass instantaneously through a group--swifter even than thought--and
leave the nerves for a moment paralysed and tingling? Even so it was
with him now. What was happening to him he did not know--some vast and
cloudy presence, at which he could not even dare to look, seemed
winging its way overhead, the passage of which he could only dimly
discern, as a man might discern the flight of an eagle in a
breeze-ruffled mountain pool.

He had come in contact with a force of incalculable energy and joy,
which was different, not in degree but in kind, from all previous
emotional experiences. He understood for the first time the meaning of
words like "mystical" and "spiritual," words which he had hitherto
almost derided as unintelligent descriptions of subjective impressions.
He had thought them to be terms expressive of vague and even muddled
emotions of which scientific psychology would probably dispose. It was
a new element and a new force, of which he felt overwhelmingly certain,
though he could offer no proof, tangible or audible, of its existence.
He had before always demanded that anyone who attempted to uphold the
existence of any psychic force should at the same time offer an
experimental test of its actuality. But he was here faced with an
experience transcendental and subjective, of which he could give no
account that would not sound like some imaginative exaggeration. He was
not even sure that Maud felt it, or rather he suspected that the
experience of wedded love was to her the heightening and emphasizing of
something which she had always known.

The essence of it was that it was like the inrush of some moving tide
through an open sluice-gate. Till then it seemed to him that his
emotions had been tranquilly discharging themselves, like the water
which drips from the edge of a fountain basin; that now something
stronger and larger seemed to flow back upon him, something external
and prodigious, which at the same time seemed, not only to invade and
permeate his thought but to become one with himself; that was the
wonder; it did not seem to him like something added to his spirit, but