mortals of our kind--with Wordsworth watching them
in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet
image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them
"in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is
infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a
personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they
all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual
and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness
that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of
us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says
to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I
am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated
soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays
from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should
honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me,
together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and
the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in
the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of
nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree
bursting into blossom always unveils it again.

It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its
poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains
they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true
harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and
indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the
essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of
the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is
like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over
the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the
solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of
Father Thames--everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no
other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain.
Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words
and actions, and our intercourse with