At times the spectacle of a smiling valley arrests you at the top of some hill. You thought you knew nothing of this country, and yet strange and sure impressions guide you; they are like old memories. You advance, and behold, you are looking at everything as if you recognized it. That road which winds between the pastures, as supple and sinuous as a beautiful river of yellow water,--you are almost certain you have followed it long ago, in some misty, far-off existence which, nevertheless, is not your own. There are times, too, when you are dreaming, as you sit alone, and suddenly a memory passes over you: the memory of some act the man you are surely never performed. Yet it is not a fabrication, an invention. You know, you feel, that it is a personal memory. A memory of what world? Of what life? Do not reject this shadowy treasure, and do not tremble! Do not accept complacently the explanations of the superstitious or of the pseudo-scientists. The flesh of your flesh was not born yesterday. Something survives in it that is contemporaneous with all the generations. Many a revelation awaits us. Let us keep for them a soul that is accessible, experienced, and not too distrustful. VIII Do not imagine that to possess memory is to possess a dead world. Among your friends there is surely one who has a house and a garden. From time to time he invites you to visit him. Every time you enter his house you observe some striking change: he has connected two parts of the building which till then had no means of communication. He has planted some new trees. The old elms are flourishing. Some rosebushes have died. Urns have been set out on the lawn. The life of men, of animals, of plants has drawn the inanimate world into its toils, modeled it, sculptured it, forced it to take part in the movement of the soul. It is in like fashion that the domains of memory cultivate themselves and live. They are not ruins, inalterable, rigid, fixed forever in the ice of some past epoch. Life still penetrates and moves them; they do not cease to share in its enterprises, its labors, its festivals. When a man has opened for you several times the same gate in the wall, when several times he has related the same adventure to you, with intervals of a few months or a few years, observe closely the spots to which he leads you and the persons to whom he presents you. Every time you will find new things, you will find that roads have been laid out, underbrush cut down, windows opened and unexpected supernumeraries called in. Is it true then that that was a dead tale, wrapped up in what we call the shroud of the past? The world of “living memory” is so indissolubly bound up with our resolutions and our acts that in accumulating memories we feel we are preparing, erecting our future itself. IX There is another refuge!