As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing. I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.
For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy the Past's full gifts....
The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts, odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master, Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--