d impossible to regret or repine. The house would receive
and guard and comfort other pilgrims in their turn. I felt that any
sense of sorrowful loss would be somehow like a kind of treachery, a
peevish ingratitude, not even to be entertained in thought, much less
expressed; to have yielded to any form of repining would have been, it
seemed to me, like spending the last few minutes of a visit, where one
had been received with a cordial and simple hospitality, in pointing
out to one's host the inconvenience of his house.

I think that where one so often makes a mistake in life is in thinking
of the beautiful past as over and done with. One ought to think of it
rather as existing. It can no more be lost than any other beautiful
thing or fine feeling can be lost. The flower may fade, the tree may
shed its leaf, the work of art may perish, the great poem may be
forgotten; the lovely ancient building, with all the grace of tradition
and memory, all the sweet mellowing of outline and detail, may be
dismantled or restored; yet the beauty is not in the passing form, but
in the spirit that expresses itself in the form on the one hand--the
great, subtle, tender, powerful spirit that is for ever working and
creating and producing--and, on the other hand, it lies no less in the
desire and worship that thrills and beats, deep in the spirit, leaning
out like one who gazes upon the sunset from the window of a tower,
listening to the appeal of beauty, looking out for it, welcoming it,
thirsting for it. Both these powers are there, the spirit that calls
and the spirit that answers the call. The mistake we make is to anchor
ourselves timidly and persistently to one set of beautiful forms, and
if they are destroyed, to feel that the world is made desolate for us.
We are apt to think that there is a sort of loyalty about this, and
that an ineffectual repining for the beautiful thing that has passed
proves the intensity of our regard and love. It is not so; we might as
well repine if we have loved a child, to find it growing up to strength
and manhood. Because we have loved the rosebud, we need not despise the
rose, and when the child loses its tender charm, when the rose drops
her loosened petals on the grass, our love is a mere sentiment, an
aesthetic appreciation, if we can only regret what is past. It is the
fragrant charm, the echoing harmony of the spirit that matters; and if
the charm passes out of our ken, if the song dies upon the a