nes of glimmering light and shadow,
to the bathing-pool. All that comes into one's mind; one takes life, and
subtracts from it all care and anxiety, all the shadow of failure and
suffering, sees it as it might be, and finds it good. That is the first
element of the charm. And then there comes into the picture a further
and more reflective charm, that which Tennyson called the passion of the
past; the thought that all this beautiful life is slipping away, even
as it forms itself, that one cannot stay it for an instant, but that the
shadow creeps across the dial, and the church-clock tells the hours of
the waning day. It is a mistake to think that such a sense comes of age
and experience; it is rather the other way, for never is the regretful
sense of the fleeting quality of things realised with greater poignancy
than when one is young. When one grows older one begins to expect a good
deal of dissatisfaction and anxiety to be mingled with it all, one finds
the old Horatian maxim becoming true:

"Vitae summa brevis nos spem vitat inchoare longam,"

and one learns to be grateful for the sunny hour; but when one is young,
one feels so capable of enjoying it all, so impatient of shadow and
rain, that one cannot bear that the sweet wine of life should be
diluted.

That is, I believe, the analysis of the charm of such a scene; the
possibility of joy, and permanence, tinged with the pathos that it
has no continuance, but rises and falls and fades like a ripple in the
stream.

The disillusionment of experience is a very different thing from the
pathos of youth; for in youth the very sense of pathos is in itself an
added luxury of joy, giving it a delicate beauty which, if it were not
so evanescent, it could not possess.

But then comes the real trouble, the heavy anxiety, the illness, the
loss; and those things, which looked so romantic in the pages of poets
and the scenes of story-writers, turn out not to be romantic at all,
but frankly and plainly disagreeable and intolerable things. The boy
who swept down the shining reaches with long, deft strokes becomes a
man--money runs short, his children give him anxiety, his wife becomes
ailing and fretful, he has a serious illness; and when after a day of
pain he limps out in the afternoon to the shadow of the old plane-tree,
he must be a very wise and tranquil and patient man, if he can still
feel to the full the sweet influences of the place, and be still
absorbed and