THE SPELL OF THE PAST 239 



touched with their hands, what they had colored 

 with their lives, that was sacred to him. 



Is it not a common experience that as we grow 

 old there comes more and more a sense of solitude 

 and exposure ? Life does not shut us in and house 

 us as it used to do. One by one the barriers and 

 wind-breaks are taken down, and we become more 

 and more conscious of the great cosmic void that en- 

 compasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded 

 us ; see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents 

 were like the roof over our heads ; what a sense of 

 shelter they gave us ! Then our hopes, our enthusi- 

 asms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed 

 the void ! A keen living interest in things, what an 

 armor against the shafts of time is that ! Always on 

 the extreme verge of time, this moment that now 

 passes is the latest moment of all the eternities. 

 New time always. The old time we cannot keep. 

 The old house, the old fields, and in a measure the 

 old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that 

 bathed them all, the sentiment that gave to them 

 hue, this is from within and cannot be kept. 



Time does not become sacred to us until we have 

 lived it, until it has passed over us and taken 

 with it a part of ourselves. While it is here we 

 value it not, — it is like raw material not yet woven 

 into the texture and pattern of our lives ; but the 

 instant it is gone and becomes yesterday, or last 

 spring, or last year, how tender and pathetic it looks 

 tons! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore 

 constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretch- 



