Revisiting the Earth

We know not the future,—the past we have felt
' Tis sweet to remember! I would not forego The charm which the Past o'er the Present can thro

To revisit the earth after one's departure from it has always been a common wish among men. The frequency with which this desire is expressed in biographies and in literature, keeps the project alive, and works it to the front in one's plans. Benjamin Franklin presents the thought in such attractive dress that we incline to adopt it for a programme. There is one item in his proposition that calls for argument at the bar of public opinion. It touches the length of the interval that should be suffered to elapse before the visit is made. So rapid is the growth, so radical are the changes, that if one's reappearance is too long delayed he would recognize nothing in the new conditions. He might as well set himself down in some other unfamiliar place. The postponement should not exceed a third of a century. It is his world that a man wants to see, and each one has his own. His antecedents and experiences have given to it a distinctive character.
On a golden day the thought came to me unbidden, I have seen three and thirty years rise and fall since I have viewed the identical spots that I would care most to look upon. Instantly I made the resolve, I will visit, in the first eight weeks of summer, every place in which I have lived or loved or labored. I ascertained, in advance, the name of some kindly disposed person at each point in my itinerary, who could identify the site of the house in which I lived, if it is not still standing, also of the school and church that I attended. The letter I had written was handed in one case to the editor of the local paper, who featured it, in his columns, asking for the names of persons now living who remembered me. Here is plainly seen an insuperable objection to waiting Ben Franklin's interval of one hundred years before revisiting the earth. This correspondence, which contributed immeasurably to the pleasure and profit of the project, ought to be undertaken, while there are two parties to conduct it. Where one's coming is expected and welcomed he passes at once into the right relations to the place, also into the atmosphere he desires.