Afterimage

“ You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. ”

“ Thus may one moment minister to years; and the life-wearied heart of old age by one delightful remembrance be restored to primal joy—the glory of the past brought beamingly upon the faded present—and the world that is obscurely passing away from our eyes re-illumined with the visions of its early morn. The shows of nature are indeed evanescent, but their spiritual influences are immortal; and from that grove now glowing in the sunlight may your heart derive a delight that shall utterly perish but in the grave. ”

“ When the sorrows of life the soul o'ercast,
And, sick of the Present, I cling to the Past;
When the eye is suffused with regretful tears,
From the fond recollections of former years;
And shadows of things that have long since fled,
Flit over the brain, like the ghosts of the dead:
Bright visions of glory—that vanished too soon ”

“ For judge and victim are awake at last; and in the twinkling of an eye, the old world has become a memory or a shrine for those tranquil pilgrims who return to worship for a while where love lies sleeping.... ”

“ So he lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age, in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely; dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's history, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which that primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces. ”

“ Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain. ”

“ We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight,—
"The gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme."
This is its simple meaning—the statement of a truth, the utterance of personal feeling. But observe its hidden abstract significance—it is the revelation of what goes on in the depths of the soul, when the dead elements of what once was, are laid before the imagination, and so breathed upon as to be quickened into a new and higher life. ”

“ Every one will have heard that persons who have been drowned and recovered, have had—in what would have been their last moments, if no means had been used to revive them—a strange vision of the past, in which their whole life seemed to float before them in review ”

“ The present, so full, so fearfully absorbing with the living, to the dead is a mystery; with those mouldering remains of man the past and the future are the great realities. The stillness, the uselessness if you will, of the old church-yard in the heart of the bustling city, renders it a more striking and impressive memento mori than the skull in the cell of a hermit. ”

“ Old memories throng upon the heart—memories of early, happy days, and of the loved and lost. The lost—ah, too soon did some die in their young beauty, whilst others dropped, like ripe fruit, into the tomb. ”

“ Where there is memory which compelleth Time, the Muses' mother, and the Muses nine, there are all ages, past and future time,—unwearied memory that does not forget the actions of the past, that does not forego to stamp them freshly, that Old Mortality, industrious to retouch the monuments of time, in the world's cemetery throughout every clime. ”

“ Never had human face displayed such beauty, such a dazzling splendour of suffering and love; never had there been such a portrayal of ancient Grief, not however cold like marble but quivering with life. ”

“ Let the Past perish!—let darkness shroud it!—let it sleep for ever over the crumbling temples and desolate tombs of its forgotten sons,—if it cannot afford us, from its disburied secrets, a guide for the Present and the Future. ”

“ On that other brow may be written some secret which, putting out the light of hope, should add the darkness of the future to the darkness of the past, until, amid the gloom before and the gloom behind, the festal lamps of the season, looked on by eyes dim with our own tears, should show as sad as tapers lighted up in the chamber of the dead. ”

“ DREAMS OLD AND NASCENT NASCENT MY world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm; An endless tapestry the past has woven drapes The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform. ”

“ Is there anything to tell about this living death—this sort of noiseless purgatory in which, as the months go by, past experiences, the hopes and fears and happinesses which were, grow fainter and fainter, till, like the future, they inspire us with nothing but indifference, leaving only the present to be endured? ”

“ But in even the darkest there are bright spots to be found, if we will only search for them; and but for ourselves there would be many more. We look back at the past, and therefore we imagine that it is something shaped of itself into its present aspect.—This is a mistake. We made the past as it is.—We painted the picture—and if it causes pain we alone are to blame. If dark and cheerless, why linger on it? ”

“ Have you ever shot in imagination the dreadful gulf that stands fixed between life and death, and between time and eternity? Have you ever tried to get a glimpse beforehand of your own place where you will be an hour after your death, when they are putting the grave-clothes on your still warm body, and when they are measuring your corpse for your coffin? ”

“ Is it not plain to you that in your youth you pursued objects which were shadows? And, were they substantial, you are a score of years beyond them now. What keeps you alive? What can you have left for your ruin of a human frame, for your pillaged temple of a body? ”

“ But death of horror is despoiled,
When Heaven shines forth beyond the tomb.
For ever gone! oh, dreadful fate!
Go visit nature—gather thence
The symbols of man's happier state,
Which speak to every mortal sense. ”

“ My imagination is so ‘montée’ by the many vestiges and echoes of past times, that I dream of a distant future, in which even ruins will be no more,—in which we shall lose not only these shadows of humanity, but human nature itself, and begin a new life in new spheres. ”

“ A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong. ”

“ The fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost, and without which the world's successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded pictures, again threw its enchantment over all their prospects. They felt like new-created beings, in a new-created universe. ”

“ Nothing of importance—only an account of the nocturnal festa of All Souls, with the glittering lights and the people watching by the graves, and leaving lights and flowers on each, the one to show the wandering souls the way back to the grave, the other to disguise the odour of mortality and illude them with the old beauty of the lost world—and the offerings of handfuls of beans, to give them sustenance on this their one mortal hour in the year. ”

“ That is the thing—the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the prose is clean obliterated by distance—that is the place to get our ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern times, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its troubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present. ”

“ Pause not on the threshold of the one dark memory that blasts the soul and sears the heart in the secret hours of night. Let the dead past bury its dead and if one must think, let it be of the hope, which the remembrance of that short glimpse into a pure if infantile soul has given to his long darkened spirit. ”

“ It conjures up the spirits of the past from their shadowy dwellings, and paints with vivid pencil the beloved features of the beloved dead. It carries him far away from the stern realities of the present ”

“ How do you know, sir, that we have not met before, centuries ago? Do you not sometimes foresee a whole scene, just as it afterward takes place? Do you not sometimes look upon a strange face with a shudder? Does not a feature—a smile—or an expression of them combined—sometimes awake the slumbering memory of ages? Is it not so? have you never communed with the dead? ”

“ Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into middle age—surely the best period in one's existence—days into which the breath of life never can be breathed again. ”

“ Is it true that all our experiences will one day revive in entire clearness of outline and full brilliancy of colour, passing before the horror-struck soul to the denial of time, and the assertion of ever-present eternity? ”

“ But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my life will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be illuminated by the light of a living present which will irradiate all its saddening features. ”

“ By rightly using each moment you will build up a character that will stand a monument upon the tomb of the dead past. Moments misspent are life and character gone, and no imprint is left on the hearts of men to tell that we have lived. How many golden moments are flying away into eternity unladen with any fruit from your life? Learn to value time. Redeem it because these days are evil. ”

“ This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. ”

“ You can only dimly remember the phantom’s shape and where he walked, and half doubt 396the dream in which he denizened and dissolved from sight. But still the gulf of vision swarms with realities—with beings where the play of life and death, joy and grief, wealth and want, are the portion of the living and the legacy of the dead. ”

“ Centuries ago, eyes long blinded by the dust of death looked upon this fair scene and understood something of its everlasting nature; centuries hence, other eyes shall behold its beauty and still dream of a distant future. ”

“ In our brief span we may divide human history into ancient, medieval, and modern; but in heaven's life a thousand years are but as "a watch in the night;" and these six watches are to heaven but as one night of grief and of loving ministry in rescuing the lost. ”

“ Imagination only can recall the details of the event, so sad and awful. In the darkness of night the sons hasten to the new-made grave, throw off the slight covering of earth, and by the feeble light of a lantern discover the remains. ”

“ The spirit of meditation and retrospection seems to hover over those solemn effigies resting in their eternal sleep, guarding in inimitable and awful silence secrets of the historic past that can never be solved. ”

“ If the dead live no more, what would memory be to us but a spectre and a sting? Should we not then seek to repress those tender recollections,—to close our eyes to those pale, sad visions of departed love? ”

“ When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering. ”

“ Like the dying echo of the last tones of the departed, it is full of hallowed memories, and cherished associations, that haunt the inner chambers of the imagination, and linger with a mournful tenderness about the better feelings of the heart. ”

“ She had forgotten that night until lately—forgotten her tears, her doubts, her hesitation; but, as at the day of judgment the scroll of our lives will be unfolded before us, so even in this world there are times when part of the history is remembered by us, when the thoughts and the resolutions of the long ago, appear before us like unwelcome ghosts. ”

“ But the story may stand, and indeed was later understood to be, a sort of allegory as to the attitude of art towards life. To understand and still more to contemplate life you must come out from the choral dance of life and stand apart. In the case of one’s own sorrows, be they national or personal, this is all but impossible. We can ritualize our sorrows, but not turn them into tragedies. We cannot stand back far enough to see the picture; we want to be doing, or at least lamenting. ”