alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those
great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor
anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to
have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like
moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the
pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are
passing, they are gone with last year's snow.

But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business
it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out
of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a
desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied
with some fair face, or perhaps--being men--with several fair faces,
once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably
real memory can make them--all but bring them back--how vividly
reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must
not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure
knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them,
slipping from our grasp!

That summer afternoon,--do you too still remember it, Miranda?--when,
under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such
prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes
from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the
stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among
the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs--do
you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest
pools, it is no use asking me to forget.

And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:--"This fairy hour--so