not having realised their joyfulness at
the time; it is a deeper regret than that; it is the shadow of the
uncertainty as to what will ultimately become of our individuality. If
one was assured of immortality, of permanence, of growth, of progress,
these regrets would fall off from one as gently as withered leaves
float from a tree; or rather, one would never think of them; but now
one has the sense of a certain number of beautiful days dealt out to
one by God, and the knowledge that they are spent one by one. Another
strange thing about the retrospective sadness of the vanished past is
that it is not the memorable days of life, as a rule, whose passing one
regrets. One would not, I think, wish to have one's days of triumph, of
success, or even the days when one was conscious of an extreme personal
happiness, back again. Partly it is that one seems to have appreciated
their quality and crushed out their sweetness--partly, too, there
mingles with days of extreme and conscious bliss a certain fever of the
spirit, a certain strain of excitement, that is not wholly pleasurable.
No, the days that one rather desires to have again are the days of
tranquil and easy contentment, when the old home-circle was complete,
and when one hardly guessed that one was happy at all, and did not
perceive--how could one?--as life rose serenely and strongly to its
zenith, what the pains and shadows of the declining life might be. And
yet more strange is it that the memory, by some subtle alchemy, has the
power of involving in a delicate golden mist days of childhood and
boyhood which one knows as a matter of fact not to have been happy. For
instance, my own memory continues to clothe my early schooldays with a
kind of sunlit happiness, though I was not only not consciously happy,
but distinctly and consciously unhappy. But memory refuses to retain
the elements of unhappiness, the constant apprehension, that hung over
one like a cloud, of punishment, and even ill-usage. I was not unduly
punished at school, and I was certainly never ill-used. But one saw
others suffer, and my own sensitive and timid nature perpetually
foreboded disaster. Day after day as a little boy I longed for home
surroundings and home affections as eagerly as the hart desires the
water-brooks. But memory pushes all that aside, and obstinately insists
on regarding the whole period in an idyllic and buoyant light.

I walk round the borders, which are all full of the little gl