And thus even our old memories must be treated with the same lightness and unaffectedness. We must do all we can to forget grief and disaster. We must not consecrate a shrine to sorrow and make the votive altar, as Dido did, into a _causa doloris_, an excuse for lamentation. We must not think it an honourable and chivalrous and noble thing to spend our time in broken-hearted solemnity in the vaults of perished joys. Or if we do it, we must frankly confess it to be a weakness and a languor of spirit, not believe it to be a thing which others ought to admire and respect. It was one of the base sentimentalities of the last century, a real sign of the decadence of life, that people felt it to be a fine thing to cherish grief, and to live resolutely with sighs and tears. The helpless widow of nineteenth-century fiction, shrouded in crape, and bursting into tears at the smallest sign of gaiety, was a wholly unlovely, affected, dramatic affair. And one of the surest signs of our present vitality is that this attitude has become not only unusual, but frankly absurd and unfashionable. There is an intense and gallant pathos about a nature broken by sorrow, making desperate attempts to be cheerful and active, and not to cast a shadow of grief upon others. There is no pathos at all in the sight of a person bent on emphasising his or her grief, on using it to make others uncomfortable, on extracting a recognition of its loyalty and fidelity and emotional fervour. Of course there are some memories and experiences that must grave a deep and terrible mark upon the heart, the shock of which has been so severe, that the current of life must necessarily be altered by them. But even then it is better as far as possible to forget them and to put them away from us--at all events, not to indulge them or dwell in them. To yield is simply to delay the pilgrimage, to fall exhausted in some unhappy arbour by the road. The road has to be travelled, every inch of it, and it is better to struggle on in feebleness than to collapse in despair. Mrs. Charles Kingsley, in her widowhood, once said to a friend, "Whenever I find myself thinking too much about Charles, I simply force myself to read the most exciting novel I can. He is there, he is waiting for me; and hearts were made to love with, not to break." And as the years go on, even the most terrible memories grow to have the grace and beauty which nature lavishes on all the relics of extinct forces and spent agonies. They become like the old grey broken castle, with the grasses on its ledges, and the crows nesting in its parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the landward wind blows swiftly all the day. XIII RETROSPECT