The power to do this
seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
to become such a self-conjurer as that.
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