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; alow 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 
D 25 
