_The recollection of past Sorrow not always painful._--But life is not all joyous. Mingled with the brighter hues of every life are also much sadness and sorrow, and these, too, are to be remembered. It might be supposed that, while memory, by recalling the pleasing incidents of the past, might contribute much to our happiness, she would add, in perhaps an equal degree, to our sorrow, by recalling much that is painful to the thoughts. Such, however, I am convinced, is not the fact. The benevolence of the Creator has ordered it otherwise. To no one, perhaps, is memory the source of greater pleasure, strange as it may seem, than to the mourner. The very circumstances that tend to renew our grief, and keep alive our sorrow, in case of some severe calamity or bereavement, are still cherished with a melancholy satisfaction of which we would not be deprived. There is a luxury in our very grief, and in the remembrance of that for which we grieve. We would not forget what we have lost. Every recollection and association connected with it are sacred. Time assuages our grief, but impairs not the strength and sacredness of those associations, nor diminishes the pleasure with which we recall the forms we shall see no more, and the scenes that are gone forever. Every memento of the departed one is sacred; the books, the flowers, the favorite walks, the tree in whose shadow he was wont to recline, all have a significance and a value which the stricken heart only can interpret, and which memory only can afford. _We recollect the Past as it was._--It is to be noticed, also, that, in such cases, the picture which memory furnishes is a transcript of the past as it was; the image is stereotyped and unchangeable. Other things change, we change; that changes not. It has a fixed value. A mother, for instance, loses a child of three years. It ever remains to her a child of three years. She remembers it as it was. She grows old; twenty summers and winters pass; yet as often as she visits the little mound, now scarce to be distinguished from the level surface, there comes to her recollection that little child as he was, when she hung, for the last time, over that pale, sweet face that she should see no more. She still thinks of him, dreams of him, as a child, for it is as such only that she remembers him. Blessed boon, that gives us just the past; when all things change, fortunes vary, friends depart, the world grows unkind, and we grow old, the former things remain treasured in our memory, and we can stand as mourners at the grave of what we once were. VIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH.--DIFFERENT THEORIES OF MEMORY.