long ago in some time and place forgotten. I think you must have observed,
many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be
strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling
of novelty is absent, or almost absent. You do not feel as if you were
seeing or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that
you knew all about very long ago. I remember once travelling with a
Japanese boy into a charming little country town in Shikoku--and scarcely
had we entered the main street, than he cried out: "Oh, I have seen this
place before!" Of course he had not seen it before; he was from Osaka and
had never left the great city until then. But the pleasure of his new
experience had given him this feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar.
I do not pretend to explain this familiarity with the new--it is a great
mystery still, just as it was a great mystery to the Roman Cicero. But
almost everybody that has been in love has probably had the same feeling
during a moment or two--the feeling "I have known that woman before,"
though the where and the when are mysteries. Some of the modern poets have
beautifully treated this feeling. The best example that I can give you is
the exquisite lyric by Rossetti entitled "Sudden Light."

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.