painfully working out?): in the
'moonlight of memory' these sorrowful mementos revisit every one of us;
and

----'But I am not _now_
That which I _have been_'--

and _vanitas vanitatum!_ are not only the satisfied croakings of _blase_
Childe Harolds, but our universal experience; while from childhood's
gushing glee even unto manhood's sad satiety, we feel that all are
nought but the phantasmagoria

'of a creature
_Moving about in worlds not realized_.'

Listen now to a snatch of melody:

'The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, wherever I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth!'

So saith the mild Braminical Wordsworth. Now it will be remembered that
Wordsworth, in that glorious ode whence we extract the above, develops
the Platonic idea (shall we call Platonic that which has been
entertained by the wise and the _feeling_ of all times?) of a shadowy
recollection of past and eternal existence in the profundities of the
Divine Heart. 'It sounds forth here a mournful remembrance of a faded
world of gods and heroes--as the echoing plaint for the loss of man's
original, celestial state, and paradisiacal innocence.' And then we have
those transcendent lines that come to us like aromatic breezes blowing
from the Spice Islands:

'Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea,
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'

But,

'descending
From these imaginative heights that yield
Far-stretching views into eternity,'--

what have the golden age and Platonic _dicta_ to do with our
word-ramble? A good deal. For we will endeavor to show that words, being
the very sign-manual of man's convictions, contain the elements of what
may throw light on both. To essay this:

Why is it that we generally speak of death as a 'return,' or a 'return
home'? And how is it that this same idea has so remarkably interwoven
itself with the very warp and woof of our language and poetry?--so that
in our fervency, we can sing:

'Jerusalem, my glorious _home