The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of scene, and on reading a certain type of book I have known it from my early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything. It is the sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching. It contains within it a vague yet poignant happiness, a rich and unknown experience. It is the nearest I ever come to a sense of pre-existence; and I have sometimes wondered if it might not be, not perhaps my own pre-existence, but some inherited recollection of happiness in which I myself had no part, but which was part of the mind of one, or of many, from whom I derive my origin. If limbs and features, qualities and desires, are derived from one's ancestors, why should one not also derive a touch of their happy dreams, their sweet remembrances?

The first time it ever came to me was when we were taken, quite as small children, to a little cottage which stood in a clearing of a great pine-wood near Wellington College. I suppose that the cottage was really older than the wood; it was guarded by great sprawling laurels, and below the house was a privet-hedged garden, sheltered all round by the pines, with a stream at the foot. The sun lay very warm on the vegetable beds and orchard trees, and there was a row of hives not painted cupboards such as one now sees, but big egg-shaped things made of a rope of twisted straw round which on warm days the humming bees made a low musical note, that rose and fell as the numbers increased or diminished. I suppose my nurse went to buy honey there we called it The Honey-woman's Cottage. I dimly remember an old, smiling, wrinkled woman opening the door to us, summoning my nurse in to a mysterious talk, and inviting us to go into the garden meanwhile.