None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into recollections which these can neither date nor confine—the smiles that welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor time.
"O love! thou makest all things even In earth and heaven: Finding thy way through prison bars Up to the stars: Or true to the Almighty plan That out of dust created man, Thou lookest in a grave, to see Thine immortality."
If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons; the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.
"Deep love, the godlike in us, still believes Its objects are immortal as itself."
'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs—dead before they die, dead burying their dead—comfortless because these are bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.[[O]]
Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is eternal as ourselves—a never ending, still beginning quest of our divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway,—of instincts striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither subjugate nor appease.
"Take this, my child," the father said, "This globe I give thy mind for bread;" Eager we seize the proffered store, The bait devour—then ask for more.
"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing on opening.
"E'en as the amorous needle joys to bend To her magnetic friend, Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs fly At his fair mistress' eye, Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff, Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."