There
is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great
misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that
discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly
fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or
unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which
have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is
the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual
circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the
_then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable
time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and
illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is
more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that,
together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;
or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an
essential element in the happiness of the present.

I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world
which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the
drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a
longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial
resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely
tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house
where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often
been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the
precaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presence
of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishing
towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back
till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a
shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.

The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my
recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been
the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the
undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the
reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line
of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low,
tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungen