take place in
meditation, or in dreams, or by actual contact,--then, in that hour of
remembrance, have we really lived with the departed, and the departed
have come back and lived with us. Though dead, they have spoken to us.
And though memory sometimes induces the spirit of heaviness,--though it
is often the agent of conscience, and wakens u to chastise,--yet, it is
wonderful how, from events that were deeply mingled with pain, it
will extract an element of sweetness. A writer, in relating one of
the experiences of her sick-room, has illustrated this. In an hour of
suffering, when no one was near here, she went out from her bed and her
room to another apartment, and looked out upon a glorious landscape of
sunrise and spring-time. "I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture
at the moment," she says, "but how was it at the end of the year? The
pains of all those hours were annihilated,--as completely vanished as if
they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain
made me possessor of this radiant picture for evermore." "Whence came
this wide difference," she asks, "between the good and the evil? Because
good is indissolubly connected with ideas,--with the unseen realities
which are indestructible." And though the illustration which she thus
gives may bear the impression of an individual personality, instead of
a universal truth, still, in the instance to which I apply it, I believe
it will very generally hold true, that memory leaves a pleasant rather
than a painful impression. At least, there is so much that is pleasant
mingled with it that we would not willingly lose the faculty of
memory,--the consciousness that we can thus call back the dead, and hear
their voices,--that we have the power of softening the rugged realities
which only suggest our loss and disappointment, by transferring the
scene and the hour to the past and the departed. And, as our conceptions
become more and more spiritual, we shall find the real to be less
dependent upon the outward and the visible,--we shall learn how much
life there is in a thought,--how veritable are the communions of spirit;
and the hour in which memory gives us the vision of the dead will be
prized by us as an hour of actual experience and such opportunities will
grow more precious to us. No, we would not willingly lose this power
of memory. One would not say, "Let the dead never come back to me in a
thought, or a dream; let them never glide before me