this sense of something out of the ordinary beat that gives the characteristic colour to our recollection.  In other words, we remember something as wonderful, admirable, exceptionally delightful, and so on, rather than as a definitely imagined event.  This being so, we unconsciously transform the past occurrence by reasoning from our present standard of what is impressive.  Who has not felt an unpleasant disenchantment on revisiting some church, house, or park that seemed a wondrous paradise to his young eyes?  All our feelings are capable of leading us into this kind of illusion.  What seemed beautiful or awful to us as children, is now pictured in imagination as corresponding to what moves our mature minds to delight or awe.  One cannot help wondering what we should think of our early heroes or heroines if we could see them again with our adult eyes exactly as they were.

While the past may thus take on an illusory hue through the very progress of our experience and our emotional life, it may become further transformed by a more conscious process, namely, the idealizing touch of a present feeling.  The way in which the emotions of love, reverence, and so on, thus transform their lost objects is too well known to need illustration.  Speaking generally, we may say that in healthy minds the play of these impulses of feeling results in a softening of the harsher features of the past, and in an idealization of its happier and brighter aspects.  As Wordsworth says, we may assign to Memory a pencil—­

  “That, softening objects, sometimes even
     Outstrips the heart’s demand;

  “That smoothes foregone distress, the lines
     Of lingering care subdues,
   Long-vanished happiness refines,
     And clothes in brighter hues."[126]

Enough has now been said, perhaps, to show in how many ways our retrospective imagination transforms the actual events of our past life.  So thoroughly, indeed, do the relics of this past get shaken together in new kaleidoscopic combinations, so much of the result of later experiences gets imported into our early years, that it may well be asked whether, if the record of our actual life were ever read out to us, we should be able to recognize it.  It looks as though we could be sure of recalling only recent events with any degree of accuracy and completeness.  As soon as they recede at any considerable distance from us, they are subject to a sort of atmospheric effect.  Much grows indistinct and drops altogether out of sight, and what is still seen often takes a new and grotesquely unlike shape.  More than this, the play of fancy, like the action of some refracting medium, bends and distorts the outlines of memory’s objects, making them wholly unlike the originals.

Hallucinations of Memory.