hopeful, and the untried,—there is indeed something sad in this. We have seen these good and beautiful and soul-touching visions once. They charmed and entranced us as they lingered with us for a few brief and blissful moments, but they have gone by and left us alone. We shall never look upon them again. Yes, it is bitter—too bitter almost for man to dwell upon much. He must turn elsewhere, and try to bury the past in forgetfulness, gazing on the new visions as they in turn pass by him, knowing that their time is short, and that they too, like all the old ones, will very soon be as though they were not. Is But it is not so. Man is passing the world by, and not the world man. Man is passing on, year after year, in his magnificent and irresistible course, never losing, and ever gaining. All he sees, and knows, and feels, and p. 98does becomes an inseparable part of himself, far more closely bound up with his life and nature than even his flesh, and nerves, and bones. It is not merely that he remembers the past and loves the past, but he is the past; and he is more the whole assembly of the past than he is anything else whatever. Man alone moves onward to perfection and to happiness, as a universe stands still ministering to his lordly progress. Even the life, the passions, and the personal progress of each particular man stand still, as it were, in the service of all the rest, and become their lasting and inalienable treasure. Nothing is wasted or irreparable but wrong-doing, and that too is not lost. p. 98 p. 99THINGS GONE BY. p. 99 “Once more, who would not be a boy?”—or girl? and revel in the delights—real or imaginary—of things gone by? What a halo is round them! Their pleasures were exquisite, and their very miseries have in remembrance, a piquancy of flavour that is almost agreeable. I suppose the habit of most of us who have attained a certain, or rather uncertain age, is to revel in the past, to endure the present, and to let the future look after itself. Once Now this is all well enough for the sentimentalist, or for the poet who, like Bulwer, can write at thirty “on the departure of youth.” But to the philosopher—that is, of course, to each member of “Pen and Pencil”—another and more useful tone of mind and method of comparison should not be absent. Is not the present what was the future to the past, and may we not by comparing the existing with what has been, as also with
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