d sets one's whole being
singing like a harp, fills high heaven with rainbows, and makes our
dingy alleys for awhile bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and
yet, if five years after we seek for what its incandescence has left us,
we find, maybe, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a
sonnet. Nothing strikes one more, unless, perhaps, the obverse, when we
see some trifling pebble-cast ripple into eternity, some fateful second
prolific as the fly aphis. And so I find it all again exampled in these
old accounts. The books that mean most for Narcissus to-day could be
carried in the hand without a strap, and could probably be bought for a
sovereign. The rest have survived as a quaint cadence in his style, have
left clinging about his thought a delicate incense of mysticism, or are
bound up in the retrospective tenderness of boyish loves long since gone
to dream.

Another observation in the same line of reflection also must often
strike one:--for what very different qualities than those for which we
were first passionate do we come afterwards to value our old
enthusiasms. In the day of their bloom it was the thing itself, the
craze, the study, for its own sake; now it is the discipline, or any
broad human culture, in which they may have been influential. The boy
chases the butterfly, and thinks not of the wood and the blue heaven;
but those only does the man remember, for the mark of their beauty upon
him, so unconsciously impressed, for the health of their power and
sweetness still living in his blood--for these does that chase seem
alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo.
And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose
and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those
pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ardours
of careful 'rubbings'; those notebooks, filled with patient data; those
long letters to brother antiquaries--of sixteen; even that famous
Exshire Tour itself, which was to have rivalled Pennant's own--what
remains to show where this old passion stood, with all the clustering
foliage of a dream; what but that quaint cadence I spoke of, and an
anecdote or two which seemed but of little import then, with such
breathless business afoot as an old font or a Roman road?

One particular Roman road, I know, is but remembered now, because, in
the rich twilight of an old June evening, it led up the gorsy stretc