awakens all the incidents of the first; when memory, like a flash of
lightning, irradiates the sky, otherwise dark and wintry, revealing
the scenes of early days, which were before quite forgotten? More
wonderful still--it is certain that things once known, which in
health were as lost to memory as if they had never been, are suddenly
recalled, and appear in all their former life and freshness, when
fever touches the brain with her delirious hand. The sick man, in his
ravings, speaks perhaps a language known only in his infancy, and
recalls incidents belonging to a period which was a total blank in his
recollections during days of robust health. And what does all
this prove but the momentous truth, that anything which once was
done,--anything which we have ever thought, uttered, or known, or
was ever inscribed in the book of memory,--remains there engraven in
characters more permanent than those which, cut deep in the hoary
monuments of Egypt, have outlived teeming centuries of human history?
Darkness may cover the page, but by a vivid and mysterious flash every
letter is illuminated. That flash may be only some trifle, such as a
note of music--the tone of some voice--

"The subtle smell which spring unbends,
Dread pause abrupt of midnight winds,--
An echo or a dream!"

And thus may it be at judgment; by the extension of the same _kind_ of
power, may our _whole_ life, in its minutest details, pass before our
eyes,--each minute of it delivering its own history of word or deed,
of things done or things received,--and each recognised as true by the
possessor of them all. Accordingly, every man is now, whether he
wills it or not, unconsciously writing or _daguerreotyping_ his own
biography;--his whole life forming a work of more importance, to