utterly away!

Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat
lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the
splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all
the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings,
under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and--what women! What
divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas
have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic
career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize
that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were
beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic
excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning
of the great resounding moments of their lives--moments made out of
real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once
so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there
forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have
paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and
give place to lesser moments!

Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not
confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole
nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French
Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely
it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking
place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking
place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing
now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are
alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those
great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor
anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to
have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like
moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the
pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are
passing, they are gone with last year's snow.

But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business
it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out
of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a
desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usu