passion for itself, and so weave it into words, that you and every
willing sufferer may recognize the fervor, and forget the personality?

Life, after all, is but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and
positive development, but rarely reaching it. And as I recall these
hints, and in fancy trace them to their issues, I am as truly dealing
with life as if my life had dealt them all to me.

This is what I would be doing in the present book. I would catch up here
and there the shreds of feeling which the brambles and roughnesses of
the world have left tangling on my heart, and weave them out into those
soft and perfect tissues which, if the world had been only a little less
rough, might now perhaps enclose my heart altogether.

"Ah," said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the stocking-leg again, with
a sigh, "there is, after all, but one youth-time; and if you put down
its memories once, you can find no second growth."

My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts and
feelings that run behind us as in those that run before us. You may make
a rich, full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour go by,
and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its million shapes of the
past, and my word for it, you shall have some flash of childhood lighten
upon you, that was unknown to your busiest thought of the morning.

Let a week go by, and in some interval of care, as you recall the smile
of a mother, or some pale sister who is dead, a new crowd of memories
will rush upon your soul, and leave their traces in such tears as will
make you kinder and better for days and weeks. Or you shall assist at
some neighbor funeral, where the little dead one (like one you have seen