excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning of the great resounding moments of their lives—­moments made out of real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and give place to lesser moments!

Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence.  How strangely it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing now!  How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are 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 real, so magical, now—­some day will be in the far past; you will sit right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the anguish of beautiful vanished things.”  And here I am today surely enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!