Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/98

64 to the same garden, heard the music of heaven from a tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was made by the "continual clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and thoughts? I had as yet no answer, but knew myself to be face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their thoughts.

At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, to the same spot upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill with her Pail, and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy, to Tom the Fool.

Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions, might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at every moment of its progress upon the thought of others, perhaps at a great distance, and utterly unknown. Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing from suggestion to suggestion, and all suggestions acting and reacting upon one another no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man passed, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by these parallel streams of thought, that unity of image, which I sought in national literature, merely the originating symbol?

From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that