The sense of loss touches us at every sunset, and in anticipation tinges all the afternoon with the sense of lengthening shadows. Even the things that seem most common, least worthy, when in use, all gain some being as time passes. Each little thing, that carelessly we value not at first, grows rich with store of years. As Antony says—
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
’Twas on a summer’s evening in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii.
Still more do places gain their hold upon us, unheeded at the time. A store of memories of days spent amid strong associations, that stirred and built the mind, are the truest riches in all after-life. We dwell upon those portions of the past, those days at Athens, or Florence, or in the Forum, as on a treasure; they are a portion of our life crystallised into the structure of our thoughts—a haven of the imagination.
And how much deeper still is the sense of the past when we turn to friends,—or even closer yet. One whom perhaps we hardly heeded in our daily life, is dignified at once by the irrevocable. But all this is merely our personal regret: the direct, selfish, individual interest.
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Let us step from this out into the past beyond our personal touch. See now a churchyard, tall in grass, with the dial on its stand, which each generation has passed by—how full of memories of gone years it is, how the eye clings to its weathered disc and minds that so it was on the day of Trafalgar or the Boyne; while by its side is the old carved sarcophagus tomb of some Turkey merchant, silently showing his virtues to each changing time, and calming the mind with quiet age. We love such for the sake of the past, which draws us to its bosom to make one more link in the long chain.