With these and similar thoughts in my mind, I strayed down to the banks of the river, and came upon the very spot, which, in those long-vanished years, had been a favourite scene of our boyish sports. The impression was overpowering; and as I gazed silently around me, my mind was subdued to that tone of feeling which Ossian so finely designates “the joy of grief.” The trees were the same, but older, like myself; seemingly unscathed by the strife of years—and herein was a difference. Some of the very bushes I recognised as our old lurking-places at “hunt the hare;” and, on the old fantastic beech-tree, I discovered the very bough from which we were accustomed to suspend our swings. What alterations—what sad havoc had time, circumstances, the hand of fortune, and the stroke of death, made among us since then! How were the thoughts of the heart, the hopes, the pursuits, the feelings changed; and, in
almost every instance, it is to be feared, for the worse! As I gazed around me, and paused, I could not help reciting aloud to myself the lines of Charles Lamb, so touching in their simple beauty.
“I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me, all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
The fresh green plat, by the brink of the stream, lay before me. It was there that we played at leap-frog, or gathered dandelions for our tame rabbits; and, at its western extremity, were still extant the reliques of the deal-seat, at which we used to assemble on autumn evenings to have our round of stories. Many a witching tale and wondrous tradition hath there been told; many a marvel of “figures that visited the glimpses of the moon;” many a recital of heroic and chivalrous enterprise, accomplished ere warriors dwindled away to the mere puny-strength of mortals. Sapped by the wind and rain, the planks lay in a sorely decayed and rotten state, looking in their mossiness like a sign-post of desolation, a memento of terrestrial instability. Traces of the knife were still here and there visible upon the trunks of the supporting trees; and with little difficulty I could decipher some well-remembered initials.
“Cold were the hands that carved them there.”
It is, no doubt, wonderful that the human mind can retain such a mass of recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are almost blank; others faintly traced; and the rest a confused and perplexed labyrinth. A thousand feelings that, in their day and hour, agitated our bosoms, are now forgotten; a thousand hopes, and joys, and apprehensions, and fears, are vanished without a trace. Schemes, which cost us much care in their
formation, and much anxiety in their fulfilment, have glided, like the clouds of yesterday, from our remembrance. Many a sharer of our early friendships, and of our boyish sports, we think of no more; they are as if they had never been, till perhaps some accidental occurrence, some words in conversation, some object by the wayside, or some passenger in the street, attract our notice—and then, as if awaking from a perplexing trance, a light darts in upon our darkness; and we discover that thus some one long ago spoke; that there something long ago happened; or that the person, who just passed us like a vision, shared smiles with us long, long years ago, and added a double zest to the enjoyments of our childhood.
Of our old class-fellows, of those whose days were of “a mingled yarn” with ours, whose hearts blended in the warmest reciprocities of friendship, whose joys, whose cares, almost whose wishes were in common, how little do we know? how little will even the severest scrutiny enable us to discover? Yet, at one time, we were inseparable “like Juno’s swans;” we were as brothers, nor dreamt we of ought else, in the susceptibility of our youthful imagination, than that we were to pass through all the future scenes of life, side by side; and, mutually supporting and supported, lengthen out the endearments, the ties, and the feelings of boyhood unto the extremities of existence. What a fine but a fond dream—alas, how wide of the cruel reality! The casual relation of a traveller may discover to us where one of them resided or resides. The page of an obituary may accidentally inform us how long one of them lingered on the bed of sickness, and by what death he died. Some we may perhaps discover in elevated situations, from which worldly pride might probably prevent their stooping down to recognise us. Others, immersed in the labyrinths of business, have forgot all, in the selfish pursuits of earthly accumulation. While the rest, the children of misfortune and disappointment, we may occasionally find out amid the great multitude of the streets, to whom life is but a desert of sorrow, and against whom prosperity seems to have shut for ever her golden gates.
Such are the diversities of condition, the varieties of fortune to which man is exposed, while climbing the hill of probationary
difficulty. And how sublimely applicable are the words of Job, expatiating on the uncertainty of human existence: “Man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up; so man lieth down and riseth not till the heavens be no more.”