Page 284 - swanns-way

which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which
have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been
preparing for their discovery; but that preparation was un-
conscious; and for us those truths date only from the day,
from the minute when they became apparent. The flowers
which played then among the grass, the water which rippled
past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
environment to their apparition lingers around the memo-
ry of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air; and,
certainly, when they were slowly scrutinised by this humble
passer-by, by this dreaming child—as the face of a king is
scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the crowd—that scrap of
nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it
would be thanks to him that they would be elected to sur-
vive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent
of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from
which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a
sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon a gravel path,
a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by the current,
and formed only to burst—my exaltation of mind has borne
them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all
these successive years, while all around them the one-trod-
den ways have vanished, while those who thronged those
ways, and even the memory of those who thronged those
trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment of land-
scape thus transported into the present will detach itself
in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncer-
tainly upon my mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I
am unable to say from what place, from what time—per-

284 Swann’s Way