Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/164

162 she heard his voice, and she saw his shadow fall by her side. Curious, that of the past our memory retains so little of what is peculiarly its own. The book we have read, the sight we have seen, the speech we have heard, these are the things to which it recurs, and that rise up within it. We remember but what can be put to present use. It is very extraordinary how little we recollect of hopes, fears, motives, and all the shadowy tribe of feelings; or indeed, how little we think over the past at all. Memory is that mirror wherein a man "beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." We are reproached with forgetting others: we forget ourselves a thousand times more. We remember what we hear, see, and read, often accurately: not so with what we felt—that is faint and uncertain in its record. Memory is the least egotistical of all our faculties.