Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/372

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
370
Looking Back.

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,—

"And often, glad no more,We wear a face of joy becauseWe have been glad of yore."

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

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.