VII. INFLUENCE OF MEMORY ON THE HAPPINESS OF LIFE.
_The Pleasures of the Past thus retained._--Of the importance of this faculty as related to other intellectual powers, I have already spoken. I refer now to its value as connected with human happiness, as the source of some of the purest pleasures of life. The present, however joyous, is fleeting and evanescent. Memory seizes the passing moment, fixes it upon the canvas, and hangs the picture on the soul's inner chambers for her to look upon when she will. Thus, in an important sense, the former years are past, but not gone. We live them over again in memory.
_Instance of Niebuhr._--It is related of Carsten Niebuhr, the Oriental traveller, that "when old and blind, and so feeble that he had barely strength to be borne from his bed to his chair, the dim remembrance of his early adventures thronged before his memory with such vividness that they presented themselves as pictures upon his sightless eye-balls. As he lay upon his bed, pictures of the gorgeous Orient flashed upon his darkness as distinctly as though he had just closed his eyes to shut them out for an instant. The cloudless blue of the eastern heavens bending by day over the broad deserts, and studded by night with southern constellations, shone as vividly before him, after the lapse of half a century, as they did upon the first Chaldean shepherds whom they won to the worship of the host of heaven; and he discoursed with strange and thrilling eloquence upon those scenes which thus, in the hours of stillness and darkness, were reflected upon his inmost soul."
_The same Thing occurs often in old Age._--Something of this kind not unfrequently occurs in advanced life. Picture to yourself an old man of many winters. The world in which his young life began has grown old with him and around him, and its brightest colors have faded from his vision. The life and stir, the whirl and tumult of the busy world, the world of to-day and yesterday, move him not. He heeds but slightly the events of the passing hour. He lives in a past world. The scenes of his childhood, the sports and companions of his youth, the hills and streams, the bright eyes and laughing faces on which his young eyes rested, in which his young heart delighted--these visit him again in his solitude, as he sits in his chair by the quiet fireside. He lives over again the past. He wanders again by the old hills, and over the old meadows. He feels again the vigor of youth. He leads again his bride to the altar. He brings home toys for his children, and enters again into their sports. And so the extremes of life meet. Age completes the circuit, and brings us back to the starting-point. We close where we began. Life is a magic ring.