The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Looking Back

ho does not cling to the past; to the days when we were what we are no longer? Who, that has taken weary steps on the great high road of mortality, does not love to plunge beneath the lava and ashes of life's volcanic throes, and disinter the buried images of childhood, of days when existence was full of flattering auspices,

and the most delusive dreams wore the shape of reality?

The visions of the past rise before us, softened and mellowed by the hues—the idealizing touch, of memory. Bygone hours catch a fictitious radiance in their flight. Their flowers were brighter, their grass greener, their waters more sparkling, their gala days more exhilarating than those of any possible present, or hoped-for future. If there were dark shadows, or harsh coloring, in those pictures, they dissolve out of the violet mists of remembrance. Time, who flings the veil of oblivion ​over "the weariness that's gone," floods the mind with the reflected light of vanished joys.

Few are the beings to whom "looking back" can bring no comfort. When life is dismantled of the garlands of youth, the gems of beauty, the drapery of imagination, memory restores what years have stolen. The spirit, bruised by the blows of sorrow, and bowed with weight of cares, looks back upon the days when opening life showed, through the rosy lens of hope, the long vista of a pathway amid pleasant groves and bowery shades, and musingly gathers the fallen blossoms of the past, to cover some dark, soul-prostrating pit-fall of the present.

The frame may cease to know the pulse of rejoicing, and yet recollections of departed gladness will bring back a smile to the faded countenance, a happy thrill to the heavy heart. Most truly says the poet,—

We have heard the love of "looking back" condemned. The lips of the worldly-wise have said, "close the page and seal the book, and look not back upon what has been, but ever forward to what shall be." But is not the future corrected by the past? What are the painful lessons of ​experience worth, if we do not contemplate their teachings?

Nothing that keeps the mind impressible, that opens it to mild and touching influences, is harmful, and retrospection has a softening power over the most flint-like natures.

Hearts that seemed almost dead to hope or feeling have leapt and palpitated at the sound of some old strain, some ballad's familiar words. Eyes that were dimmed by oft-shed tears have kindled at the sight of some withered flower, some faded relic that conjured up the shapes, the voices, the aspirations of other days.

Many a wife who has seen the choice of her youth lapsing from virtue until her heart insensibly turned against him, and the hand which should have been stretched out to lure him back into the paths of honor, was paralyzed, has felt her dead affections vivified and awakened by the remembrance of the happy hours of her betrothal, her bridal days, evoked by some olden token, some letter full of loving words which chanced to be turned over in the search after other things. Her tenderness has been rekindled and her strength renewed by these trifles, which forced her to "look back," more potently, than by all the reasoning and chiding to which stern Duty and rebuking Conscience subjected her.

How many instances are there of minds which have wandered into the fantastic realms of mad​ness, summoned home in an instant, by the touching of some electric chord of the past, which caused the spirit to "look back," and thus attuned the jarring strings and brought sweet order out of the wild confusion of the brain!

One of the most beautiful and melting illustrations of the beneficent wonders wrought by "looking back," is given by Moore, in his exquisite allegory of "Paradise and the Peri," when he portrays a man, whose soul is heavy with manifold crimes, watching the gambols of an innocent child. At the sound of the vesper bell the boy starts up from his couch of flowers and sinks upon his knees, his hands fervently clasped and his pure brow and eyes lifted heavenward. A long-silent string vibrates in the heart of the wretched man; he recalls the days when he knelt with a prayer on his lips,—lips that were as sinless as those of that little child; his whole life of guilt rises in terrible review before him, the first tears of penitence quench the evil fire of his eyes and wash his guilt-stained cheeks—he kneels! he prays!

Who can doubt that the soul has eternal memory? Every man carries about him invisible tablets which are his "book of life." The work of every day is indelibly graven upon a new page. The records may seem to be obliterated in this world, but every line must be read in that sphere where there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nothing hid that shall not be known. But even on ​this earth the leaves long closed, the book long sealed, may be suddenly opened by some marvellous and inexplicable agency, by the sudden shock of a life-peril, by strong mental excitement, by the spiritualizing effect of long illness, or by the sound of the approaching footsteps of the great Summoner. To those who foster the habit of "looking back," the chronicles of that wondrous book furnish a key to the enigma of all the tangled threads in life's web, and the finger of Divine Providence is every hour revealed in their mysterious unwinding