triviality to one person, is lit up and played over by all manner of An 

 dream-evoking suggestiveness to his neighbour, nay even some- everyday 

 times to his nearest of kin ? A terrace wall, beneath which Experience 

 from time to time trains pass, their approach heralded by earth- 

 shakings, and followed by a trail of smoke, disputing the air 

 with the scent of Tree-Heliotropes and Myrtles growing along 

 the wall ; red evening lights, dappling a sea, either lake-like 

 in its calmness, or ruffled at most by mere channel-born waves 

 and wavelets ; little outliers of granite, one of which is surmounted 

 by a rust-stiffened, and now useless weathercock; a low headland, 

 and still lower line of shore, overhung by a perennial reek of 

 smoke from the chimneys of a medium-sized town. What can 

 there be in such a scene to awaken thought, or to throw the rein 

 upon the neck of anybody's imagination ? Nothing, yet at the 

 same time everything ! Few propositions have more to sustain 

 them, or are wider in their applicability, than the one which 

 insists upon the unimportance of any given scene or circum- 

 stance in itself, its vital, far-reaching, all but infinite importance 

 as the seed-plot of what is, or at all events may be, to 

 follow in the future. Standing in such a scene, upon 

 such a terrace, a crowd of forgotten impressions seem to rise 

 and circle slowly around the returned visitor, like some troop 

 of discreet ghosts, the very Carnations and Roses suggesting less 

 themselves, or their actual predecessors, than these phantoms, 

 fair and flowery, withered and unsightly, as the case may be, of 

 which they seem to be almost the visible embodiments. Such 

 an experience is, moreover, not one person's experience, but 

 everybody's, and it is this very commonness which constitutes 

 its value, impressions such as these, many times repeated, constitut- 

 ing, so far as philosophy has been able to ascertain for us, the 

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