can think of her, at the age of seventy-two,
heart-broken and desolate, going back to the home of her youth
in the fond expectation of finding consolation, without a pang
of sympathetic pity? She found everything changed."

_That_, indeed, is to all of us the greatest grief, when we return to
the home of our youth. It is as if, during the years of our absence, we
had expected everything to stand as still as in the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty while the charm rested upon it. We are fain to see the
trees in their young greenness as when they sheltered our childhood, to
find the hedgerows blooming with the same violets, to hear the
mill-stream murmuring with the same music. Time furrows our brows with
wrinkles, and streaks our hair with silver; our hearts grow colder; our
minds lose their elasticity and freshness; our friends pass away from
our side. But still we think to ourselves that in the old scenes all
things are as they were. We say to ourselves: The bird sings as of old
in the elm-trees at the garden-foot; the rose-bush blossoms as of old
against our favourite window.

"The varying year with blade and sheaf
Clothes and re-clothes the happy plains;
Here rests the sap within the leaf,
Here stays the blood along the veins.
Faint shadows, vapours lightly curled,
Faint murmurs from the meadows come,
Like hints and echoes of the world
To spirits folded in the womb."

* * * * *

But we regain the old familiar places, and, alas! we find that change
has been as busy with them as with us. The signs of decay are upon the
trees; the brook has ceased to flow; the rose-bush has withered to the
ground. There are trees as green and streams as musical and flowers as
sweet as in our youth; but they are not the streams or flowers or trees
which delighted us, and to us they can never be as dear. But a worse
alteration has taken place than any visible in the face of nature. We
discover that we have lost the old habits, the old capacity of
enjoyment; and we soon discover that it was the sympathies, the hopes,
the aspirations of youth which, after all, lent to these early scenes
their rare and irrecoverable attraction.

And thus it was that Miss Herschel found everything changed. A life of
fifty years spent in a certain routine and upon certain objects, had
unfitted her to tread in the old paths. It soon became clear to her that
all her ideas a