THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY 139 



run alone. We knew nothing, had seen 

 nothing, looked forward to nothing. Life 

 for us was only a day in a house and a door- 

 yard, a span of playtime between two sleeps. 



A few days ago, I say. Yet what a weary 

 distance we have traveled since then, and 

 what an infinity of things we have seen and 

 dealt with. How many thoughts we have 

 had, coming we know not whence, how many 

 hopes, one making way for the other, how 

 many dreams. We have made friends; 

 friends that were to be friends forever ; and 

 long, long ago, with no fault on either side, 

 the currents of the world carrying us, they 

 and we have drifted apart. It is all we can 

 do now to recall their names and their man- 

 ner of being. Some of them we should pass 

 for strangers if we met them face to face. 



What a long procession of things and 

 events have gone by us and been forgotten. 

 Almost we have forgotten our own childish 

 names, it is so many years since any one called 

 us by them. Should we know ourselves, 

 even, if we met in the street the boy or girl 

 of thirty or forty or fifty years ago ? Was 

 it indeed we who lived then ? who believed 



