w glory and new pleasantness.

It is for stirring the chords of memory, then, that I love Hazlitt's
essays, and for the same reason (I remember) he himself threw in his
allegiance to Rousseau, saying of him, what was so true of his own
writings: "He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like
drops of honey-dew to distil some precious liquor from them; his
alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and
piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy
that strewed his earliest years." How true are these words when applied
to himself! and how much I thank him that it was so! All my childhood is
a golden age to me. I have no recollection of bad weather. Except one or
two storms where grandeur had impressed itself on my mind, the whole
time seems steeped in sunshine. "_Et ego in Arcadia vixi_" would be no
empty boast upon my grave. If I desire to live long, it is that I may
have the more to look back upon. Even to one, like the unhappy Duchess,

"Acquainted with sad misery
As the tamed galley-slave is with his oar,"

and seeing over the night of troubles no "lily-wristed morn" of hope
appear, a retrospect of even chequered and doubtful happiness in the
past may sweeten the bitterness of present tears. And here I may be
excused if I quote a passage from an unpublished drama (the unpublished
is perennial, I fancy) which the author believed was not all devoid of
the flavour of our elder dramatists. However this may be, it expresses
better than I could some further thoughts on this same subject. The
heroine is taken by a minister to the grave, where already some have
been recently buried, and where her sister's lover is destined to
rejoin them on the following day.[37]

* * * * *

What led me to the consideration of this subject, and what has made me
take up my pen to-night, is the rather strange coincidence of two very
different accidents--a prophecy of my future and a return into my past.
No later than yesterday, seated in the coffee-room here, there came into
the tap of the hotel a poor mad Highland woman. The noise of her
strained, thin voice brought me out to see her. I could conceive that
she had been pretty once, but that was many years ago. She was now
withered and fallen-looking. Her hair was thin and straggling, her dress
poor and scanty. Her moods changed as rapidly as a weathercock before a
thunderstorm. One moment