The blue fly sang in the pane, the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peered about;
Old faces glimmered thro' the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without."

Yet even this unsurpassed poem does no more than _partially_ revive
and recall the reality to me of similar memories of long, long ago,
when an invalid child I was often left in a house entirely alone, from
which even the servants had absented themselves. Then I can remember
how after reading the Arabian Nights or some such unearthly romance,
as was the mode in the Thirties, the very sunshine stealing craftily
and silently like a living thing, in a bar through the shutter,
twinkling with dust, as with infinitely small stars, living and dying
like sparks, the buzzing of the flies who were little blue imps, with
now and then a larger Beelzebub--a strange imagined voice ever about,
which seemed to say something without words--and the very furniture,
wherein the chairs were as goblins, and the broom a tall young woman,
and the looking-glass a kind of other self-life--all of this as I
recall it appears to me as a picture of the absence of human beings as
described by TENNYSON, _plus_ a strange personality in every object--
which the poet does not attempt to convey. This is, however, a very
small or inferior illustration; there are far more remarkable and
deeply spiritual or æsthetically-suggestive subjects than this, and
that in abundance, which Art has indeed so reproduced as to amaze the
many who have only had snatches of such observation themselves.

But the magicians, SHELLEY, or KEATS, or WORDSWORTH, only convey
_partial_ echoes of certain subjects, or of their specialties. It is