Greeks gave him, in certain terra
cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing
light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and
teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic
relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the
genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite
as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the
infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into
vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe
and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master,
Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends
he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which
have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the
gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards
whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced
by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely
knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right
to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with
happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's
heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--

"Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten."

For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places
where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we
recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled
illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its
gift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought
home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely
another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which
our spirit is the richer?

LOSING ONE'S TRAIN

The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch
did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while
rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that
when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless
to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a
quarter instead of