Page:Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse.pdf/74

 one who remembers, accurately and with ease, historical facts, ancient or modern; another, dates and eras; a third, revolutions and conspiracies. There are some who have stored their memories with biographical sketches and moral essays, or the various departments of narrative and poetry; while others are wholly absorbed in the passing events of the day, the variations of the political atmosphere, the fluctuations of society, pieces cf scandal, fashions, manners and amusements; unconscious that they are holding up to an attentive observer, a mirror of their own intellectual habits, and a key to unlock the secret cabinet of the mind.

Memory is also valuable as a source of intellectual delight. When affliction has embittered the present, or age cast its shade over the future, it presents in the past, a picture at once consolatory and alluring. Thus we find the aged invariably attached to the days that are gone, more than to those that are passing, or to come; even recollected pain loses its anguish, and the traces of memory though broken and imperfect are delightful to the eye that has grown dim to the illusions of hope. But to us, my young friends, who have never felt affliction to disgust us with life, or age to paralize the ardour of fancy, still to us memory opens a full source of pleasure.