*
It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward
in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all
the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the
beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still
spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days
is handed down. In this way, public curiosity may be
gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us,
but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and
so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his
spirit than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS
QUAM CORPORIS.
*
The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least
look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most
certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
together, in the very homeland of the beautiful. We may
have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the
thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand
forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull
circle of surroundings; so that we see it 'with a child's
first pleasure,' as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the
lake-side.
*
But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the
glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and
their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of
women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effect,
with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of
cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of
sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and
swept together by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden
with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented
underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing up, solemn and
sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
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