The whole picture came before Hugh as an almost impossible sweet and rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant passion at his heart. What was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had had some desirable element in them? Would it not be better, more tranquillising for the spirit, if the memory retained only the dark shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul, by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that were then passing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future time be touched by the same reluctant, pathetic quality of recollection? It was certainly so; the mind, dwelling on the past, had that extraordinary power of rejecting all the dreary debris of life, and leaving only the pure gold, a hundred times refined; and yet it brought with it that mournful shadow of sadness, of the irrevocable, the irreplaceable past. But it seemed, too, to hold a hope within it, a hope that, if the pilgrimage of the soul were not to be ended by death, then memory, unshadowed by present sadness, in the deep content of a freedom from all material anxieties, might become one of the purest and deepest treasures that it was possible to conceive. Hugh thought that his disembodied spirit might, in the after time, perhaps haunt those very river-banks, and with the mystery solved that had oppressed and darkened his human pilgrimage, might surrender itself to that beautiful and absolute tranquillity, that peace which the world could not give, for which he daily and hourly yearned. Perhaps indeed it was the presence of some such invisible, haunting _revenant_ whispering at his ear, longing even for some contact with healthy humanity, that had given him the wistful sense of mystery and longing. Who could say? And then the mood of recollection lapsed and rolled away like mists from a morning hill, and left Hugh once more confronted with the ugliness and dreariness of the actual world; only from his vision remained the hope, the resolution, to extract from life, as it passed, the purest and most delicate elements; its sweetness, its serenity; so that he might leave, as far as was possible, an inheritance of undimmed beauty for the memory to traffic with, to rid it so far as he could from all the envy, the dull detail, the tiresome complexities that might poison retrospect, leaving nothing but the fine gold of thought. XXII Death--The Real and the Ideal--A Thunder Shower--Storm and Shadow