“Why have some lines of poetry a potent and indescribable influence over us — an influence that is not conditioned by their merit? There are four lines of Mrs. Hemans which have always, from the time I first read them as a child, opened the doors of magic to me:
The sounds of the sea and the sounds of the night
Were around Clotilde as she knelt to pray
In a chapel where the mighty lay
On the old Provencal shore.
Today they recurred to me and I shivered with profound delight. Why? They are not great poetry. Her lines make my heart ache with a supernal fleeting ecstasy. Is it because of the picture they paint? Is it because ‘the sounds of the sea and the sounds of the night’ were around me in childhood? Is it because of the romance always associated with ‘the old Provencal shore’? It does not seem to me that the secret is in any of these things. It goes deeper still — to some former life and some intense moment in that life — perhaps!”
