But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made, one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as the French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers say so.
But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insist rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prick themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle, the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel, of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south, to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious compensations for that bad thing called going away.
Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur." It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity; poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the _then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval. And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that, together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one; or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an essential element in the happiness of the present.