for all the happiness that I had enjoyed there; the trees, the crags, the embowered lawn with its smiling flowers, the verandah with its chairs piled up for departure, the dismantled library, all seemed to say farewell with the same tenderness with which they had always welcomed us.  It seemed impossible to regret or repine.  The house would receive and guard and comfort other pilgrims in their turn.  I felt that any sense of sorrowful loss would be somehow like a kind of treachery, a peevish ingratitude, not even to be entertained in thought, much less expressed; to have yielded to any form of repining would have been, it seemed to me, like spending the last few minutes of a visit, where one had been received with a cordial and simple hospitality, in pointing out to one’s host the inconvenience of his house.

I think that where one so often makes a mistake in life is in thinking of the beautiful past as over and done with.  One ought to think of it rather as existing.  It can no more be lost than any other beautiful thing or fine feeling can be lost.  The flower may fade, the tree may shed its leaf, the work of art may perish, the great poem may be forgotten; the lovely ancient building, with all the grace of tradition and memory, all the sweet mellowing of outline and detail, may be dismantled or restored; yet the beauty is not in the passing form, but in the spirit that expresses itself in the form on the one hand—­the great, subtle, tender, powerful spirit that is for ever working and creating and producing—­and, on the other hand, it lies no less in the desire and worship that thrills and beats, deep in the spirit, leaning out like one who gazes upon the sunset from the window of a tower, listening to the appeal of beauty, looking out for it, welcoming it, thirsting for it.  Both these powers are there, the spirit that calls and the spirit that answers the call.  The mistake we make is to anchor ourselves timidly and persistently to one set of beautiful forms, and if they are destroyed, to feel that the world is made desolate for us.  We are apt to think that there is a sort of loyalty about this, and that an ineffectual repining for the beautiful thing that has passed proves the intensity of our regard and love.  It is not so; we might as well repine if we have loved a child, to find it growing up to strength and manhood.  Because we have loved the rosebud, we need not despise the rose, and when the child loses its tender charm, when the rose drops her loosened petals on the grass, our love is a mere sentiment, an aesthetic appreciation, if we can only regret what is past.  It is the fragrant charm, the echoing harmony of the spirit that matters; and if the charm passes out of our ken, if the song dies upon the air, if the sunset hue fades, it is all there none the less, both the beauty and the love we bore it.  I do not mean that the conquest is an easy one, because our perceptions are so narrow and so finite that when the sweet sound or the delicate