"The light that never was, on sea or land."
The child's conjecture of the future is one of some great, bright, busy thing beyond the hills or over the river. But the thought is not definite: having nothing to remember, he has nothing by which to model his idea.
The man looks back at the past in much the same manner, to be sure,—always with something between,—if not the river or the hills, at least a breath of mist out of which rises the vision he invokes; but the vision has a shape, precise and clear.
If it is sadness that he seeks, sadness comes, dark as the nun of the Penseroso, without a glimmer of the countless and daily trifles of fairer aspect that made her actual presence possible to suffer,—comes to flatter his memory with assurance of strength in having endured so much and yet survived, or to stab him with her phantom poniards freshly and fiercely as ever,—no diffused affair, but a positive shape of melancholy.
But if the phase to be recalled is of a cheerful sort, how completely likewise does it assert its essence,—a sunbeam falling through that past from beginning to end. All the vexatious annoyances of the period that then seemed to counterbalance pleasure are lost to view, and only the rosy face of an experience that was happiness itself smiles upon him. What matter the myriad frets that then beset him in the flesh? They were superficial substance,—burrs that fell; he was happy in spite of them; he does not remember them; he sees nothing but the complete content; he in fact possesses his experience only in the ideal.
It is the dropping out of detail that accomplishes this in one case and the other. In either, the point of view alone is fixed. The rest is variable, and depends, it may be, on the nature of that subtile and volatile ether through which each man gazes.
That the latter, the brighter vision, predominates, is as true as that sunny days outnumber rainy ones. Though Argemone, rather than remember, may have blotted out her memory; or though Viviani, after fifty years of renowned practice in his profession, may be unable to look back at it without a shudder,—then endowed with youth, health, energy, ambition,—now lacking these, the recollection of the suffering he has seen overwhelming his sensitive nature blackly and heavily as clods of burial might do;—yet they are but those points of shadow that throw the fact into prominence. It has been said that pain, remembered, is delight. This is true only of physical pain. Mental agony ever remains agony; for it is the body that perishes and the affections of the body. Still, with most men the past is an illuminated region, forever throwing the present into the shade. In the Zend Avesta, a farsang is defined to be the space within which a long-sighted man can see a camel and distinguish whether it be white or black; but the milestones of the memory are even less arbitrary than this: no matter how far the glance flies, in those distances every man's camel is white. Thus the backward view is ever of
"Summits soft and fair,
Clad in colors of the air,
Which to those who journey near
Barren, brown, and rough appear."
The maidens of to-day are not so beautiful as the maidens were when our young senses could drink in their beauty; the St. Michael pears have died out; the blight has got possession of the roses. When we married, a white one climbed up the house-side and thrust its snowy sprays in at the casement of the wedding-chamber. Find us such climbers now! A young girl once on the beach, watching her father's ship slip away on the wind, had her glance caught by a sparkle in the sand; and there lay a treasure at her feet, a heap of crimson crystals, a mine of jewels. What wealth! What possibilities! No more going to sea! No more watching ships out of sight! She gathered a double-handful of the splendid cubes as earnest, and ran back to the house with them. Such assurance having been displayed, there was no hesitation. The man-servant followed her swift guidance to the shore again, with shovel and sack and a train of the whole household,—but the tide had come in, and the place was not there. Day after day was search made for that mass of garnets, but always in vain. It was one of those deposits that Hugh Miller somewhere speaks of, as disclosed by one tide and hidden by another. But all her life long, though she wore jewels and scattered gold, no gem rivalled the blood-red lustre of that sudden sparkle in the sands; and no wealth equalled the fabulous dreams that were born of it. It was to her as precious and irreparable as to the poet the Lost Bower.
"I affirm that since I lost it
Never bower has seemed so fair;
Never garden-creeper crossed it,
With so deft and brave an air;
Never bird sang in the summer, as I saw and heard them there."