ess 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 backwa