As the satisfactions, therefore, arising from memory are less arbitrary, they are more solid, and are, indeed, the only joys which we can call our own. Whatever we have once reposited, as Dryden expresses it, in the sacred treasure of the past, is out of the reach of accident, or violence, nor can be lost either by our own weakness, or another's malice:
——Non tamen irritum
Quodcunque retro est, efficiet; neque
Diffinget, infectumque reddet,
Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.
Hor. lib. iii. Ode 29. 43.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine,
The joys I have possess'd in spite of fate are mine.
Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r,
But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.