there, belongs to our duty; and to escape from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds.  There is more of it, if you will listen again;” and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they had not been lived a thousand years before,—­listened like a child to a story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I had made, after that April morning, year by year.

* * * * *

“Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul.  An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling.  The fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe.  It is the sense of our mortality that thus exalts nature.  Yet before her antiquity merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates our faculties.  Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the substance of thought; some touch of man’s hand that knows a writing beyond nature’s can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock a monument.  The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes England ancestral soil.  Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation.  On the Western prairies I have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the land.

“The sense of age in man’s life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below thought.  We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time’s ocean, lost relics of their human charge long vanished away.  Startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the face of stone.  I learned this lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form