osing upon a little white hand, and a pair of
gentle tear-dimmed eyes looking back through Time's dark avenue upon a
fading past?

I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a friend--glad because I know
the saltness has been washed from out the tears, and that the sting must
have been plucked from the beautiful face of Sorrow ere we dare press
her pale lips to ours. Time has laid his healing hand upon the wound
when we can look back upon the pain we once fainted under and no
bitterness or despair rises in our hearts. The burden is no longer
heavy when we have for our past troubles only the same sweet mingling of
pleasure and pity that we feel when old knight-hearted Colonel Newcome
answers "_adsum_" to the great roll-call, or when Tom and Maggie
Tulliver, clasping hands through the mists that have divided them, go
down, locked in each other's arms, beneath the swollen waters of the
Floss.

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver brings to my mind a saying of
George Eliot's in connection with this subject of melancholy. She
speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's evening." How wonderfully
true--like everything that came from that wonderful pen--the observation
is! Who has not felt the sorrowful enchantment of those lingering
sunsets? The world belongs to Melancholy then, a thoughtful deep-eyed
maiden who loves not the glare of day. It is not till "light thickens
and the crow wings to the rocky wood" that she steals forth from her
groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is there she meets us. At her
shadowy gate she takes our hand in hers and walks beside us through
her mystic realm. We see no form, but seem to hear the rustling of her
wings.

Even in the toiling hum-drum city her spirit comes to us. There is a
somber presence in each long, dull street; and the dark river creeps
ghostlike under the black arches, as if bearing some hidden secret
beneath its muddy waves.

In the silent country, when the trees and hedges loom dim and blurred
against the rising night, and the bat's wing flutters in our face, and
the land-rail's cry sounds drearily across the fields, the spell sinks
deeper still into our hearts. We seem in that hour to be standing by
some unseen death-bed, and in the swaying of the elms we hear the sigh
of the dying day.

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light
our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and
cheese--ay, and even kisses--do not seem