What was happening to him he did not know--some vast and cloudy
presence, at which he could not even dare to look, seemed winging
its way overhead, the passage of which he could only dimly discern,
as a man might discern the flight of an eagle in a breeze-ruffled
mountain pool.
He had come in contact with a force of incalculable energy and joy,
which was different, not in degree but in kind, from all previous
emotional experiences. He understood for the first time the meaning
of words like "mystical" and "spiritual," words which he had
hitherto almost derided as unintelligent descriptions of subjective
impressions. He had thought them to be terms expressive of vague
and even muddled emotions of which scientific psychology would
probably dispose. It was a new element and a new force, of which he
felt overwhelmingly certain, though he could offer no proof,
tangible or audible, of its existence. He had before always
demanded that anyone who attempted to uphold the existence of any
psychic force should at the same time offer an experimental test of
its actuality. But he was here faced with an experience
transcendental and subjective, of which he could give no account
that would not sound like some imaginative exaggeration. He was not
even sure that Maud felt it, or rather he suspected that the
experience of wedded love was to her the heightening and
emphasizing of something which she had always known.
The essence of it was that it was like the inrush of some moving
tide through an open sluice-gate.
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