The love of past times, the craving for that which is gone, is one of the more obscure instincts which appears to be brought forward by the wider growth of interests of the mind. It takes many forms; it appeals to the intellect, to the curiosity, to the affections; yet it is really a single instinct, and one which, from its strength, must spring from a primal cause. The sense of loss touches us at every sunset, and in anticipation tinges all the afternoon with the sense of lengthening shadows. Even the things that seem most common, least worthy, when in use, all gain some being as time passes. Each little thing, that carelessly we value not at first, grows rich with store of years. As Antony says— You all do know this mantle: I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; ’Twas on a summer’s evening in his tent, That day he overcame the Nervii. Still more do places gain their hold upon us, unheeded at the time. A store of memories of days spent amid strong associations, that stirred And how much deeper still is the sense of the past when we turn to friends,—or even closer yet. One whom perhaps we hardly heeded in our daily life, is dignified at once by the irrevocable. But all this is merely our personal regret: the direct, selfish, individual interest. But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. Let us step from this out into the past beyond our personal touch. See now a churchyard, tall in grass, with the dial on its stand, which each generation has passed by—how full of memories of gone years it is, how the eye clings to its weathered disc and minds that so it was on the day of Trafalgar or the Boyne; while by its side is the old carved sarcophagus tomb of some Turkey merchant, silently showing his virtues to each changing time, and calming the mind with quiet age. We love such for the sake of the past, which draws us to its bosom to make one more link in the long chain. And pass inside the church, where Tudor and Edwardian, and Norman and Saxon, have each poured out their souls; in which every stone seems saturated with their longings; where pleadings and rejoicings seem to mutely fill the dead air; where the walls have echoed every bride and every infant And if past loves and hopes seem thus to give their life to the lasting walls, how fearful is the breath of terror that clings round every stone of the Colosseum. One single mangled death there made ten thousand fiends of men who sat on those benches; and every year had its thousands of such agonies, through all the centuries. The mass of horror beyond all thought that dwells in that arena, is only exceeded by the thousandfold fire of cruelty that has burnt on those seats around. The place is hell petrified. And, within a stone’s throw of that, how the whole past, from which our present ages have sprung, lives before us in the Forum. The triumphs where the beauty of Greek art served but to make the clumsy westerner gape; where the noblest blood of other lands,—Perseus, Caractacus, Zenobia,—has stood abased; where the barbaric Goth has fiercely joyed in splendid pillage of its wondrous wealth; where Theodoric and Karl had each hoped to restore the shattered decay, with the rough material of their own kin, which needed yet a thousand years of hewing; a space of greater hopes and dreads, greater successes and failures, than any other acre that we know. And yet, before all this, there passed age after age of men, who built up civilisations which we Turn now to our own land, and on a wide western moor stand within a ring of grey stones, which our own flesh and blood there placed in faith and trust, for something greater than the cares of daily life; so far from us in generations, so far from us in thoughts, that we can hardly grasp the pulse of the same life with them, and feel what they felt. Yet it draws us like those sounds which were the first music to man, the sough of the wind in the wood, and the lap of the wave on the shore, ever the sweetest yet to ourselves. And the grey stones still touch us and bind our thoughts and our love of all our forefathers to themselves in elemental memories. What underlies all this fascination of the past? What is it that thus moves men In thinking of the days that are no more? It is the same great attraction, whether it be a personal memory, or the being of our forefathers, or a page strong with past life in some history, or the handling of the drinking bowls of the oldest kings of the earth as they come from the dust of Egypt. It is but one sense in varied forms. It is the love of life. In primal seas first sprang that love of life,—of preservation, of continuity of life. Even long before man it led to the moral growth of self-sacrifice, of |