he
past also has no real existence; the actual sensation and the interest
belonging to it are both fled; but it _has had_ a real existence, and
we can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been;
and therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly
insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind whether it
ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold
upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us
to existence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or
miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been
one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a
dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure
fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and
the records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender
regret to that which was at one time to me my all, when I revive the
glowing image of some bright reality,

The thoughts of which can never from my heart?

Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn
back in fancy to 'those suns and skies so pure' that lighted up my early
path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to
think of all that has happened to me, an of all that can ever interest
me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my
earliest and not least painful recollections)--

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever vanish'd from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r--

yet am I mocked with a lie when I venture to think of it? Or do I not
drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth when I but 'retrace
its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore'? I cannot say with the same
poet--

And see how dark the backward stream,
A little moment past so smiling--

for it is the past that gives me most delight and most assurance of
reality. What to me constitutes the great charm of the _Confessions_ of
Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather
up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a
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. When
he begins the las