Memories 183 



a land so fair. In youth fantastic lights and signals 

 are seen beckoning us to strange and undiscovered 

 countries which most of us strive in vain to reach, 

 though we may win near enough to see that the 

 glamour was a mere effect of shade and distance, and 

 the land is one where no pleasure is. Thenjwe learn 

 how we have gone forth from a kingdom of romance, 

 whose beauty is now revealed with such vivid and intense 

 brilliance as makes every little blue flower and every 

 happy moment of it shine as they did on opening sense. 

 As the future narrows to a thin and diminishing space 

 between us and the dark ledge that borders life, the 

 wayfarer is concerned, not with the black abysmal 

 mystery he is approaching, but with things that have 

 long gone by, incidents on the sunny highway of his 

 early journey. The unbidden memories that throng in 

 on a Winter twilight are they that come again in the 

 Winter of old age. 



Were it possible, nothing could be more suggestive 

 than to compare the detailed map and history of a 

 patriarch's life with the savings from it caught by the 

 sieve of memory. The choice is as arbitrary as that 

 of the jackdaw, who stores a useless tuft of horsehair 

 as carefully as a purloined jewel. Some men may, 

 indeed, by concentrating the mind upon a single train 

 of thought, partly modify the natural eclecticism of 

 recollection so that a Napoleon dies adream of battle 

 and a Goethe asking for more light, while there are 

 those who weep over the evil they have done and those 



