“If the Countess of Tripoli, who seems also to have owned a susceptible temperament, had been his cousin and lived next door, he would probably not have admired her the least, would certainly never have wooed her in such wild and pathetic verse; but he gave her credit for all the charms that constituted his own ideal of perfection, and sickened even to death for the possession of his distant treasure, simply and solely because it was so far away!
“What people all really love is a dream. The stronger the imagination the more vivid the phantom that fills it; but on the other hand, the waking is more sudden and more complete. If I were a woman instead of a—a—specimen, I should beware how I set my heart upon a man of imagination, a quality which the world is apt to call genius, with as much good sense as there would be in confounding the sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil with the blacksmith himself. Such a man takes the first doll that flatters him, dresses her out in the fabrications of his own fancy, falls down and worships, gets bored, and gets up, pulls the tinsel off as quick as he put it on; being his own he thinks he may do what he likes with it, and finds any other doll looks just as well in the same light and decked with the same trappings. Narcissus is not the only person who has fallen in love with the reflection, or what he believed to be the reflection, of himself. Some get off with a ducking, some are drowned in sad earnest for their pains.
“Nevertheless, as the French philosopher says, ‘There is nothing so real as illusion.’ The day that is dead has for men a more actual, a more tangible, a more vivid identity than the day that exists, nay, than the day as yet unborn. One of the most characteristic and inconvenient delusions of humanity is its incapacity for enjoyment of the present. Life is a journey in which people are either looking forward or looking back. Nobody has the wisdom to sit down for half-an-hour in the shade listening to the birds overhead, examining the flowers underfoot. It is always ‘How pleasant it was yesterday! What fun we shall have to-morrow!’ Never ‘How happy we are to-day!’ And yet what is the past, when we think of it, but a dream vanished into darkness—the future but an uncertain glimmer that may never brighten into dawn?
“It is strange how much stronger in old age than in youth is the tendency to live in the hereafter. Not the real hereafter of another world, but the delusive hereafter of this. Tell a lad of eighteen that he must wait a year or two for anything he desires very eagerly, and he becomes utterly despondent of attaining his wish; but an old man of seventy is perfectly ready to make arrangements or submit to sacrifices for his personal benefit to be rewarded in ten years’ time or so, when he persuades himself he will still be quite capable of enjoying life. The people who purchase annuities, who plant trees, who breed horses for their own riding are all past middle age. Perhaps they have seen so many things brought about by waiting, more particularly when the deferred hope had caused the sick heart’s desire to pass away, that they have resolved for them also must be ‘a good time coming,’ if only they will have patience and ‘wait a little longer.’ Perhaps they look forward because they cannot bear to look back. Perhaps in such vague anticipations they try to delude their own consciousness, and fancy that by ignoring and refusing to see it they can escape the inevitable change. After all, this is the healthiest and most invigorating practice of the two. Something of courage seems wanting in man or beast when either is continually looking back. To the philosopher ‘a day that is dead’ has no value but for the lesson it affords; to the rest of mankind it is inestimably precious for the unaccountable reason that it can never come again.”
“Be it so,” I answered; “let me vote in the majority. I think with the fools, I honestly confess, but I have also a theory of my own on this subject, which I am quite prepared to hear ridiculed and despised. My supposition is that ideas, feelings, delusions, name them how you will, recur in cycles, although events and tangible bodies, such as we term realities, must pass away. I cannot remember in my life any experience that could properly be called a new sensation. When in a position of which I had certainly no former knowledge I have always felt a vague, dreamy consciousness that something of the same kind must have happened to me before. Can it be that my soul has existed previously, long ere it came to tenant this body that it is so soon about to quit? Can it be that its immortality stretches both ways, as into the future so into the past? May I not hope that in the infinity so fitly represented by a circle, the past may become the future as the future most certainly must become the past, and the day that is dead, to which I now look back so mournfully, may rise again newer, fresher, brighter than ever in the land of the morning beyond that narrow paltry gutter which we call the grave?” I waited anxiously for his answer. There are some things we would give anything to know, things on which certainty would so completely alter all our ideas, our arrangements, our hopes, and our regrets. Ignorant of the coast to which we are bound, its distance, its climate, and its necessities, how can we tell what to pack up and what to leave behind? To be sure, regarding things material, we are spared all trouble of selection; but there is yet room for much anxiety concerning the outfit of the soul. For the space of a minute he seemed to ponder, and when he did speak, all he said was this—
“I know, but I must not tell,” preserving thereafter an inflexible silence till it was time to go to bed.
CHAPTER VII
THE FOUR-LEAVED SHAMROCK
We are all looking for it; shall we ever find it? Can it be cultivated in hothouses by Scotch head-gardeners with high wages and Doric accent? or shall we come upon it accidentally, peeping through green bulrushes, lurking in tangled woodlands, or perched high on the mountain’s crest, far above the region of grouse and heather, where the ptarmigan folds her wings amongst the silt and shingle in the clefts of the bare grey rock? We climb for it, we dive for it, we creep for it on our belly, like the serpent, eating dust to any amount in the process; but do we ever succeed in plucking such a specimen as, according to our natures, we can joyfully place in our hats for ostentation or hide under our waistcoats for true love?
Do you remember Sir Walter Scott’s humorous poem called the “Search after Happiness”? Do you remember how that Eastern monarch who strove to appropriate the shirt of a contented man visited every nation in turn till he came to Ireland, the native soil indeed of all the shamrock tribe; how his myrmidons incontinently assaulted one of the “bhoys” whose mirthful demeanour raised their highest hopes, and how
“Shelelagh, their plans was well-nigh after baulking,