village lake; and just as the swan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts itself on its wings and betakes itself to the void again, it leaves us, and our sole possession is its memory.  And it is characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone.  Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.  If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.  It is a gleam of unreckoned gold.  From the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has been, lives in memory.  We have not the voice itself; we have only its echo.  We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.  And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment there lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which past happiness dwells is always a regretful memory.  This is why the tritest utterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has always about it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects.  In the wake of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour.  The finest set of verses of our modern time describes how the poet gazed on the “happy autumn fields,” and remembered the “days that were no more.”  After all, a man’s real possession is his memory.  In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, and attains thereby a certain picturesqueness.  The grim thought stands in the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape.  The thought of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then.  The young man cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air.  The young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers.  The most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably comfortable persons.  When a man’s mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such foolery.  The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards.  The young poet uses death as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine.  In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most pretentious.  The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the magnitude of its issues.  It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and while undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his “Lara,” as he informs us.  Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes in whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who then affected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felt his richest wines powdered with the dust of graves,—­of which wine, notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him,—­wrote,