"the flash"

"sometimes,...it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond... 

This moment came rarely - ...but the wonder of it stayed with her for days... It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a greybird lighting on her window-sill in a storm, with the singing of 'Holy, holy, holy' in church, with the glimpse of a kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a 'description' of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty."

                                                -  L.M. Montgomery,  Emily of New Moon