an the delicious memory of some
passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing
the deep attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and
trivial circumstances. In looking backward they may find that several
things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory
than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in
particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that
power to his heart and brain, which created all things anew; which was
the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of
nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied
enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart
bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put
in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present,
and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of
windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a
carriage; when no place is too solitary and none too silent, for him who
has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any
old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures,
the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images
written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enamelled in fire," and make
the study of midnight:--

"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy
loving heart."

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection
of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with
the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who
said of love,--

"All other pleasures are not worth its pains:"

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be consumed
in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow
with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing
fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was
coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the
men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive
and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the
tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate.
The clouds h