It is true that the present time is more or less prosy, vulgar, commonplace to most men; not till we have lived it and colored it with our own experiences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have been preëminently the case with Carlyle; he was morbidly sensitive to the crude and prosy present, and almost preternaturally alive to the glamour of the past. What men had done, what they had touched with their hands, what they had colored with their lives, that was sacred to him. Is it not a common experience that as we grow old there comes more and more a sense of solitude and exposure? Life does not shut us in and house us as it used to do. One by one the barriers and wind-breaks are taken down, and we become more and more conscious of the great cosmic void that encompasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded us; see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents were like the roof over our heads; what a sense of shelter they gave us! Then our hopes, our enthusiasms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed the void! A keen living interest in things, what an armor against the shafts of time is that! Always on the extreme verge of time, this moment that now passes is the latest moment of all the eternities. _New_ time always. The old time we cannot keep. The old house, the old fields, and in a measure the old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that bathed them all, the sentiment that gave to them hue, this is from within and cannot be kept. Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it, until it has passed over us and taken with it a part of ourselves. While it is here we value it not,--it is like raw material not yet woven into the texture and pattern of our lives; but the instant it is gone and becomes yesterday, or last spring, or last year, how tender and pathetic it looks to us! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretching farther and farther back of us like a fair land idealized by distance into which we may not again enter. The future is alien and unknown, but the past is a part of ourselves. So many ties bind us to it. The past is the cemetery of our days. There they lie, every one of them. Musingly we recall their faces and the gifts they brought us,--the friends, the thoughts, the experiences, the joys, the sorrows; many of them we have quite forgotten, but they were all dear to us once. If our friends should come back from their graves, could they be what they once were to us? Not unless our dead selves came back also. How precious and pathetic the thought of father and mother to all men; yet the enchantment of the past is over them also. They are in that sacred land; their faces shine with its hallowed light, their voices come to us with its moving tones.