Retrospect

“ It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and the immediate future. ”

“ My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished. ”

“ AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDRESS TO THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION [1:1]
There are times in the lives of institutions as well as individuals when retrospect is a good thing; when it is desirable to look back and see how far one has travelled, and by what road; whether the path of progress has always been in the right direction; whether it may not have been sometimes unnecessarily devious; whether valuable things may not have been dropped or omitted, in quest of which it may be desirable to travel back ”

“ Which comes to scarce more than saying indeed, no doubt, that nothing more complicates and overloads the act of retrospect than to let one's imagination itself work backward as part of the business. Some art of preventing this by keeping that interference out would be here of a useful application ”

“ I replied. "There is indeed much in what you say. One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty. A century is not so very long a retrospect. I might have known your great-grand-parents. ”

“ So that hope and anticipation walked with the bolder pace, inasmuch as memory and retrospection were still their cherished companions. In a word, men's tenacity of the past gave them the larger and brighter vision of the future. ”

“ CHAPTER XXII ONE afternoon, toward dusk the fifth day of her captivity—Retrospection seized her and whirled her away in his purple chariot.
Retrospection, who is one of the unmentioned gods of tragedy, is never very particular about his backgrounds ”

“ And spurn the gods to whom peace bids me bow.
And I remember ancient loyalties
And ardent ships of hope that have been wrecked
On sordid shores, and brooding much on these,
Prospect grows pallid before retrospect,
And all the hallowed passions of the years,
And all ideal longings, and dear pain,
And dedicated griefs, and secret tears,
Sweep back to overpower me again.
... Yet all that we have loved is part of us,
And those great hours are builded in our lives,
That vanished dream is yet the heart of us
And through the present still for utterance strives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anticipation is therefore more primary than recollection; projection than summoning of the past; the prospective than the retrospective. Given a world like that in which we live, a world in which environing changes are partly favorable and partly callously indifferent, and experience is bound to be prospective in import; for any control attainable by the living creature depends upon what is done to alter the state of things. ”

“ The conclusion of an administrative year is naturally a time for retrospection rather than for announcement and planning, and seldom may we derive more satisfaction from such a backward glance than at the present period. ”

“ In the present advanced and happy times it is instructive to take a retrospective glance at the days of our forefathers of the nineteenth century, and to meditate upon the political struggles and events of the past hundred years, that by so doing we may gain a clear insight into the causes which have led to the present wonderful developments. ”

“ In the place of retrospect we may find our repose again in contemplating our ignorance and weakness, and ascertaining the conviction and strength which they have wrought out for us.
What is gained by living and travelling?
One of the most striking and even amusing results is the perception of the transient nature of troubles. The thoughtful traveller feels something like wonder and amusement at himself for being so depressed by evils as he finds himself in the midst of long-idealized objects. ”

“ A dialogue of retrospection is a common device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set before him. With Browning for the purpose of mental analysis a dialogue of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses towards the future. ”

“ These are but milestones on the turnpike. Human progress is over a vast field, and it is only at considerable intervals that a retrospective view enables us to discern whether the movement has been slow or rapid, onward or retrograde. ”

“ Out of this matter of mutual opinion arises a cheering emotion, both to the retrospective traveller and to the thinker among the tombs. Each foreign companion of the one, and each who lies buried about the path of the other, has had his hero, and even succession of heroes, among the living. I know not what those who despise their kind can make of this fact, that every human being whom we know has found in every stage of his conception of moral beauty some living exemplification which satisfied him for the time. ”

“ MALAPROP Well, Sir Anthony, since you desire it, we will not anticipate the past!—so mind, young people—our retrospection will be all to the future. ”

“ This is a cheering sign of the times, indicating that the days are past when men were possessed by their leaders, and that the time is coming when power will be less unfairly distributed, and held on a better tenure than it has been. ”

“ Never one that I ever met and I have met many. One can realise how the memory of that time of liberty and sunshine swelled and swelled (in a man with the imagination to love pictures and a fair outlook from his windows) as the years of fettering old-world conventions and grey skies went by. The older he grew the brighter shone the lights of the past—as with you and me, dear reader—and the craving to return to the scenes of youth, which are the realms of romance to the aged, must have been in him what the craving to return to England was to me for so many, many years. ”

“ An equivalent for this advantage is possessed by such as live in those critical periods of society when retribution is hastened, or displayed in clear connexion with the origin of its events. The present seems to be such an age. It is an age in which the societies of the whole world are daily learning the consequences of what their fathers did, the connexion of cause and effect being too palpable to be disputed; it is an age when the active men of the New World are beholding the results of their own early counsels and deeds. ”

“ As at the moment of sudden death the complete panorama of one's past life is before the mental eye—as one dreams a whole story in multitudinous detail between the housemaid's morning knock at one's door and the echo of it that wakes one (if those legendary happenings are to be believed) —so I seemed to live all my little childhood over again in the few minutes that Mr B. held his horse on the highroad, and I stood at his shoulder to gaze at the place, which, although not my birthplace, still meant for me the beginning of all things. ”

“ That generation unto generation still
⁠Contrives to will.
Errors, obscenities and passions breed,
⁠With germs of violence rife,
As in a culture fitted to that end
⁠In human life,
Nor need man to their breeding his impulsion lend. ”

“ I divined a deadly homesickness in the eyes that followed our progress as long as we could be seen, the same ache of the heart that afflicted me, for so many years, whenever I saw a ship going to England without me. Yet one could be quite sure that they never dreamed of slipping cables on their own account as long as duty to the Empire held them where they were. Not the man, at any rate. ”

“ Some dispensation—like the political condition of France, for instance—will still be centuries in the working out; but in other cases—the influence of eminent men, for example—results seem to follow more closely than in the slower and quieter past ages of the world. ”

“ To re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's great dramas again upon the stage of action,—frankly, this may not be formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes, stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on treaties. ”

“ By comparison, the Past, though glozed beyond all semblance of truth, is a clinging heritage of canonised ignorance, brutality and baseness; a drag rather than a stimulus. And as day by day, year by year, our own fluid Present congeals into a fixed Past, we shall do well to take heed that, in time to come, our own memory may not be justly held accursed. ”

“ How must the mention of the tremendous "secret" have thrilled through the hearts of citizens who had for weeks been anxiously searching every man's countenance to find it out. The picture given as from the pleader's imagination was, as every man knew, derived from the confession of the criminal. ”

“ Faints, and the lingering dead pause to mark how
The thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed,
Jealous of all their blood-bought testament.
The world's an amphitheatre; Versailles
'Twixt quick and dead dictates a century. ”

“ But whatever may be the fate of families, races and nations, their influence is in some sense perpetual. The Past is not dead. By a mysterious cord it is connected with the Present. Could we analyze our life, we should perhaps find that but few of the emotions we experience are to be traced to events and circumstances which have occurred in our own time. ”

“ Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. ”

“ When did the experience of mankind become stationary or retrograde, so that we must act from the obsolete inferences of past periods, not from the living impulse of existing circumstances, and the consolidated force of the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the present instant, naturally projecting us forward into the future, and not driving us back upon the past? ”

“ An old Australian, at any rate, can understand it. In his young days he had been a pioneer squatter. What old man looks back on this experience otherwise than with the feeling that he has seen the Golden Age? ”

“ In the New World, however long some moral causes may be in exhibiting their results, there have been certain deeds done which have produced their consequences with extraordinary rapidity and an indisputable clearness. May all men open their eyes to see them, and their hearts to understand them! ”

“ By various influences, death is made to constitute a larger element in their estimate of collective human experience, a more conspicuous object in their contemplation of the plan of Providence, than it is to, perhaps, any other people. ”

“ Here then it seems evident, that, when we transfer the past to the future, in order to determine the effect, which will result from any cause, we transfer all the different events, in the same proportion as they have appeared in the past, and conceive one to have existed a hundred times, for instance, another ten times, and another once. ”

“ Nowadays we may see the office of historical research as that of explaining, and therefore lightening, the pressure that the past must exercise upon the present, and the present upon the future. Today we study the day before yesterday, in order that yesterday may not paralyze today, and today may not paralyze tomorrow. ”

“ THE STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE CIRCULATION A Study of the Times and Labors of William Harvey [9]
History in general is but a record of the succession of great events or epochs which have moulded the world's affairs. That which is of the greatest import in the life of the individual may count for little in the lives of his contemporaries, and yet it must be said that in the events of to-day there has occurred a great epoch in the life of each of you, presumably the most important as yet in your personal records. ”

“ The stamp of originality was impressed upon every one, and inspired a deep, involuntary respect. I have seen no assembly of chosen men, and no company of the highborn, invested with the antique dignities of an antique realm, half [Pg 180] so imposing to the imagination as this collection of stout-souled, full-grown, original men, brought together on the ground of their supposed sufficiency, to work out the will of their diverse constituencies. ”

“ BURIED ABROAD.
Wide roll the waves between us and our dead
And silence muffles every questing cry,
A world of traffic thwarts each yearning sped,
Empires of sun and shadow sundering lie.
Islanded in a radiance of the past,
Sunk in the deepening flood-tide of the days,
Wrenched from our care, where they were anchored fast,
By the ancient harsh oblivion of the race ”

“ He who has once undertaken to interpret his own age must make his interpretation keep pace with the progress of that age, if progress there be. It is, therefore, my duty to acknowledge as past what has ceased to be the present, before the same audience to whom I characterized it as the present. ”

“ The mistakes of the past seem to have been necessary, when they look back. Given the same circumstances, they could not have acted differently; but they seldom look back—the present, that is always climbing on into the future, occupies them exclusively. ”

“ Sometimes, then, in our race from day to day it is necessary to stop the headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the past. Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is already blurred, and dim. ”