THE SPELL OF THE PAST 241 



refuse it ; " and Sir Thomas Browne says, "For my 

 own part I would not live over my hours past, or 

 hegin again the thread of my days." Sir Thomas 

 did not want to live his life over again, for fear he 

 would live it worse instead of hetter. Cicero did 

 not regret that he had lived, but intimates that he 

 had had enough of this life, and wanted to enter 

 upon that new and larger existence. " Oh, glorious 

 day ! when I shall depart to that divine company 

 and assemblage of spirits, and quit this troubled and 

 polluted scene ! " 



But probably the true reason was not given in 

 either case. We do not like to go hack. We are 

 done with the past ; we have dropped it, sloughed 

 it off. However pleasing it may be in the retro- 

 spect, however fondly we may dwell upon it, our 

 real interest is in the present and the future. Prob- 

 ably no man regrets that he did not live at an earlier 

 period, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand 

 years ago ; while the wish that our existence had 

 been deferred to some future age is quite common. 

 It all springs from this instinctive dislike to going 

 back, and this zest for the unknown, the untried. 

 There are many experiences in the lives of us all 

 that we would like to repeat, but we do not want to 

 go back. We habitually look upon life as a journey ; 

 the past is the road over which we have just come ; 

 these were fair countries we just passed through, de- 

 lightful experiences we had at this point and at that, 

 but we do not want to turn back and retrace our 

 steps. There is more or less a feeling of satiety. 



