, looking at
it, far more than in the present do you live in the past. Perhaps it is
for this that we are so jealous of events: we fear to have our memories
impinged upon by pain. The woman whose lover has deserted her mourns not
the man she must despise, but the love that has dropped out of her past,
proving hollow and worthless. But she to whom he remains faithful
borrows perpetually store of old love to enrich the daily feast; she
gilds and glorifies the blest to-day with the light of that love
transfigured in the past. And so, in other shapes and experiences, it is
with all of us indeed; since into this fairy-land all can fly for
refuge, can pick again their roses and ignore their thorns, can

"Change
Torment with ease, and soonest recompense
Dole with delight,"

Nor is this living in the past entirely the voluntary affair of pleasure
and of memory. In another and more spiritual way it masters us. Never
quite losing the vitality that once it had, with an elastic springiness
it constantly rebounds, and the deed of yesterday reacts upon the deed
of to-day. There is something solemn in the thought that thus the
blemish or the grace of a day that long ago disappeared passes on with
awfully increasing undulations into the demesne of the everlasting. And
though the Judge of all may not cast each deed of other days and weigh
them in the balance for us or against, yet what those deeds have made
us, that we shall stand before him when,

"'Mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks;
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes!"

Yesterday, in truth,--looking though it may like a shadow and the
phantom of itself,--is the only substance that we possess, the one
immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve
perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying
into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where
it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the indestructible elements, and the
two great central forces forever at their work, we might fancy
ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world.
For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten
seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's
orbit,--swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to
ellipse,