Whether it was as apparent on the due date, or whether of that ten
pounds I have ever looked upon the like again, is surely no affair of
the Reader's; but, lest he should do my friend an injustice, I had
better say--I haven't.
CHAPTER IV
ACCOUNTS RENDERED
Nothing strikes one more in looking back, either on our own lives or on
those of others, than how little we assimilate from the greatest
experiences; in nothing is Nature's apparent wastefulness of means more
ironically impressive. A great love comes and sets one's whole being
singing like a harp, fills high heaven with rainbows, and makes our
dingy alleys for awhile bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and
yet, if five years after we seek for what its incandescence has left us,
we find, maybe, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a
sonnet. Nothing strikes one more, unless, perhaps, the obverse, when we
see some trifling pebble-cast ripple into eternity, some fateful second
prolific as the fly aphis. And so I find it all again exampled in these
old accounts. The books that mean most for Narcissus to-day could be
carried in the hand without a strap, and could probably be bought for a
sovereign. The rest have survived as a quaint cadence in his style, have
left clinging about his thought a delicate incense of mysticism, or are
bound up in the retrospective tenderness of boyish loves long since gone
to dream.
Another observation in the same line of reflection also must often
strike one:--for what very different qualities than those for which we
were first passionate do we come afterwards to value our old
enthusiasms.
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