It was on a warm, bright summer afternoon that I woke to the sense both of what I had lost and what I had gained.  I had wandered out into the country, for in those days I had a great desire to be alone.  I stood long beside a stile in the pastures, a little village below me, and the gables and chimneys of an old farmhouse stood up over wide fields of young waving wheat.  A cuckoo fluted in an elm close by, and at the sound there darted into my mind the memory, seen in an airy perspective, of innumerable happy and careless days, spent in years long past, with eager and light-hearted companions, in whose smiling eyes and caressing motions was reflected one’s own secret happiness.  How full the world seemed of sweet surprises then!  To sit in an evening hour in some quiet, scented garden in the gathering dusk, with the sense of a delicious mystery flashing from the light movements, the pensive eyes, the curve of arm or cheek of one’s companion, how beautiful that was!  And yet how simple and natural it seemed.  That was all over and gone, and a gulf seemed fixed between those days and these.  And then there came first that sad and sweet regret, “the passion of the past,” as Tennyson called it, that suddenly brimmed the eyes at the thought of the vanished days; and there followed an intense desire to live in it once again, to have made more of it, a rebellious longing to abandon oneself with a careless disregard to the old rapture.

Then on that mood, rising like a star into the blue spaces of the evening, came the thought that the old days were not dead after all.  That they were assuredly there, just as the future was there, a true part of oneself, ineffaceable, eternal.  And hard on the heels of that came another and a deeper intuition still, that not in such delights did the secret really rest; what then was the secret?  It was surely this:  that one must advance, led onward like a tottering child by the strong arm of God.  That the new knowledge of suffering and sorrow was as beautiful as the old, and more so, and that instead of repining over the vanished joys, one might continue to rejoice in them and even rejoice in having lost them, for I seemed to perceive that one’s aim was not, after all, to be lively, and joyful, and strong, but to be wiser, and larger-minded, and more hopeful, even at the expense of delight.  And then I saw that I would not really for any price part with the sad wisdom that I had reluctantly learnt, but that though the burden galled my shoulder, it held within it precious things which I could not throw away.  And I had, too, the glad sense that even if in a childish petulance I would have laid my burden down and run off among the flowers, God was stronger than I, and would not suffer me to lose what I had gained.  I might, I assuredly should, wish to be more free, more light of heart.  But I seemed to myself like a woman that had borne a child in suffering, and that no matter how restless and vexatious a care that child might prove to be, under no conceivable circumstances could she wish that she were barren and without the experience of love.  I felt indeed that I had fulfilled a part of my destiny, and that I might be glad that the suffering was behind me, even though it separated me from the careless days.