And so back to that original, that disconcerting fact that Florence Barclay was to me ten years ago an equivalent for Turgenev. She meant as much; she revealed as much. She touched the heart as surely and as deeply. And again comes that uncomfortable knowledge that a book is after all only a focus for ourselves, a spade to unearth the absolute. And does it matter what sort of a spade you use as long as the work gets finished? The object of any emotion is of less matter than the intensity of the emotion that object has evoked. Is a love any the less real, less tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer from _King Lear_, from _Anna Karenin_, from _Lycidas_, because these books have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. In their company we have forgotten momentarily the anxieties, the ambitions, the frivolities that dazzle and distract us, that move in glittering, bewildering profusion on the surface of our lives, that belong to time and space. In such moments of heightened consciousness we are in harmony with ourselves, we see ourselves as a part of that pattern that Pater spoke of, the pattern whose threads pass out on either side of us. And it is towards such moments that we are always striving, for the most part indirectly, striving in our work, our love affairs, our amusements and distractions. We are dissatisfied with what we are and with what we have. That which is immortal in us struggles towards what is remote, in the hope, in the belief that it may prove immortal. It may be that books add something to our emotional, our intellectual stature, that they are the rich soil in which we dig for treasure; but I prefer to think that we are the rich soil, that we contain an immortal spirit, and that our ultimate success or failure must be judged by our ability to keep that spirit nourished and alive. If this be so, and it is a philosophy that commended itself to Wordsworth, are we not right in saying that Florence Barclay and Turgenev are fulfilling a similar function in different spheres?