it is in religion that hope and strength are
sometimes found; but if it is a retrospective nature--and the poetical
nature is generally retrospective, because poetry is concerned with
the beauty of actual experience and actual things, rather than with
the possible and the unknown--then it finds its medicine for the
dreariness of life in memory. Of course there are many simple and
healthy natures which do not concern themselves with visions at
all--the little businesses, the daily pleasures, are quietly and even
eagerly enjoyed. But the poetical nature is the nature that is not
easily contented, because it tends to idealisation, to the thought
that the present might easily be so much happier, brighter, more
beautiful, than it is.

An eager soul that looks beyond
And shivers in the midst of bliss,
That cries, "I should not need despond,
If this were otherwise, and this!"

And so the soul that has seen much and enjoyed much and endured much,
and whose whole life has been not spoiled, of course, but a little
shadowed by the thought that the elements of happiness have never been
quite as pure as it would have wished, turns back in thought to the
old scenes of love and companionship, and evokes from the dark, as
from the pages of some volume of photographs and records, the pictures
of the past, retouching them, it is true, and adapting them, by deftly
removing all the broken lights and intrusive anxieties, not into what
they actually were, but into what they might have been. Carlyle laid
his finger upon the truth of this power, when he said that the reason
why the pictures of the past were always so golden in tone, so
delicate in outline, was because the quality of fear was taken from
them. It is the fear of what may be and what must be that overshadows
present happiness; and if fear is taken from us we are happy. The
strange thing is that we cannot learn not to be afraid, even though
all the darkest and saddest of our experiences have left us unscathed;
and if we could but find a reason for the mingling of fear with our
lives, we should have gone far towards solving the riddle of the
world.

This indulgence of memory is not necessarily a weakening or an
enervating thing, so long as it does not come to us too early, or
disengage us from needful activities. It is often not accompanied by
any shadow of loss or bitterness. I remember once sitting with my
beloved old nurse, when she was near her ninetieth ye