Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/172

162[January 16, 1869] dear ugly old woman, and present her to the world as my wife; the choice I have made from among the hundreds of beautiful young creatures ready to my hand. But to her lawful proprietor she is as much her former self as her present; for the change has come so gently that he has not noticed how it came, and has never been shocked by it, as he would have been shocked by a sudden revelation. He loves her, both for what she was and what she is; and remembers how she lost this beauty which had once been so characteristic of her, and how that infirmity came upon her—when their child died, and she nearly broke her heart for grief—when he himself was ill, and when she nursed him and lost her complexion, and got a skin disease in consequence, which not all the skill and persistency of physicians can overcome. And remembering all this, he feels that there is an honour greater than mere skin-deep beauty even in her wrinkles and her loose lines, her stiff joints and her spoiled complexion.

Our feeling for places known and loved in early life—for the old home and conditions—is another form of returning to the old love. Such places come back to us in our dreams more frequently than persons return. We smell the pine woods and the bracken; we see the lake and the heather-clad hills; we are standing under the white cliff watching the sea come foaming and tumbling in as we used when we were children; or we are out in the grey of the morning, with that old dog at our heels; and we put up the little brown birds and the startled whirring pheasants as we used to put them up a long time ago. The burning glories of the American forests, the luxurious loveliness of the South, the romance of the East, the fervid life of the tropics, all are as nothing to us compared to one day of the "hard grey weather" of our youth, one hour of the sport and vigour of old times. Alas! we want to be young again, that is what our dreams mean; for, without youth, our return to those old loves is not practically satisfactory. How often, when we do actually go back home after a life spent elsewhere, our dreams vanish! We cannot climb the familiar crags as we used; we cannot stand the fatigue of a long day's partridge shooting through the stubble, or of grouse shooting on the moors; the oars are heavy and not so easily feathered as of old; our gun and rod are less manageable than they were; the young enthusiasm which cared no more for a ducking than it cared for a midge-bite, is washed away in the fear of the rheumatic pains sure to follow damp. Alas, for the frailty of the flesh in the presence of so much stoutness of soul! Sometimes, indeed, we are able to work the new vein opened up on the old ground, and to accept the former love in its altered relations with ourselves. We then content ourselves, like my Uncle Toby, with mimic repetitions of what we can never perform in their former fulness again; or we satisfy ourselves with watching what we cannot share. If we cannot climb those purple crags, our young ones can, while we wait down below, watching the sunshine and the shadow hurrying over them, and bringing out, or covering down, every jut and cranny, every patch of purple heather, or golden gorse, or tuft of waving fern, with the rapidity of a transformation scene. The love of nature increases with time, and grows by knowledge; the longer we stand by this great desk, the more we get to love the lessons learned on it, and to appreciate the value of the work it enables us to perform.

Old books, too, are old friends, to which we return with faithful loyalty. It is doubtful if any one who reads Gil Blas, Don Quixote, or the Thousand and One Nights, for the first time in mature life, ever has the same exquisite enjoyment of them as those who have read them, while young for the story, and when old for the art or the philosophy. Delightful they must always be to every one with brains; but they have lost that delicious aroma, that magic colouring, which the imagination of youth supplies out of its own richness.

On révient à ses prémiers amours in religion, too, as well as in other things—if not always, still often enough to furnish an example. The convert who has lived contentedly enough in his new faith, not unfrequently turns back to the old upon his death-bed, and dies in the creed in which he had been born—but had not lived. All of which gives us occasion to speculate, whether the mind be really independent, or only seemingly so, and whether first impressions are not of more importance than all the subsequent self-education acquired. 

  .—I am getting more and more entertained every hour with the spectacle here. Again I repeat there would seem to be no such dramatic touchstone to bring out human nature and human character. If one had but a window in every forehead! The strangest thing is the utter ignorance and wildness of these poor dupes, who play on without principle or approach to system. So simple, so easily attainable, and yet it occurs to no one. This morning I win eight times in succession. In spirit I mean. I paste the card in here as a little relic, and as a proof of my forecasting powers. The marks show when I played—I mean in spirit.

