It is not, however, attempted to be denied that though the future is nothing at present, and has no immediate interest while we are speaking, yet it is of the utmost consequence in itself, and of the utmost interest to the individual, because it _will have_ a real existence, and we have an idea of it as existing in time to come. Well then, the past also has no real existence; the actual sensation and the interest belonging to it are both fled; but it _has had_ a real existence, and we can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been; and therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind, whether it ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us to existence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and the records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender regret to that which was at one time to me _my all_, when I revive the glowing image of some bright reality, ‘The thoughts of which can never from my heart?’ Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn back in fancy to ‘those suns and skies so pure’ that lighted up my early path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to think of all that has happened to me, and of all that can ever interest me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my earliest and not least painful recollections)— ‘What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever vanish’d from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow’r’— yet am I mocked with a lie, when I venture to think of it? Or do I not drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth, when I but ‘retrace its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore?’ I cannot say with the same poet— ‘And see how dark the backward stream, A little moment past so smiling’—