How often had the thought of their brevity spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even his present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of death, of a coming end, in everything! How had he longed, sometimes, that there were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory he could commit his own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his love, Ay! the very sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose the sense:--one strong to retain them even though [71] he forgot, in whose more vigorous consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening of capacity which was all that remained of them in himself! "Oh! that they might live before Thee"-- To-day at least, in the peculiar clearness of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in which the experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an abiding-place.

And again, the resultant sense of companionship, of a person beside him, evoked the faculty of conscience--of conscience, as of old and when he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor of self-reproach even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
Himself--his sensations and ideas--never fell again precisely into focus as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience.

But for once only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have felt the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in life never to be forgotten.

It gave him a definitely ascertained measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which [72] had brought him, as he was, into the world at all.

And again, would he be faithful to himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he did but remain just there?
Must not all that remained of life be but a search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual things--a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his actual experience might present?
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