There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the
expression _Rue du Temps Perdu_--the Street of Lost Time. Down this
shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later.
Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is
nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins.
But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its
compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so
it is not easy to say, but imaginative, brooding natures who live much
in their emotions are prone to this chronic homesickness for the Past,
this ever-recurring, mournful retrospect, this tender, wistful gaze into
the years that are no more.
It is this tendency in us all as we grow older that makes us drift back
to the scenes of our youth; it satisfies a deep-seated want to look
again upon the once familiar places. We seek them out with an eagerness
wholly wanting in ordinary pursuits. The face of the fields, the hills,
the streams, the house where one was born--how they are invested with
something that exists nowhere else, wander where we will! In their
midst memories come crowding thick and fast; things of moment, critical
episodes, are mingled with the most trivial happenings; smiles and tears
and sighs are curiously blended as we stroll down the Street of Lost
Time.
While we are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures
are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life,
showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the
passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the
snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not
wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the Past has such a hold on
me!" But even before middle life he experienced this yearning, even then
confessed that he had for many years viewed everything in the light of
the afternoon's sun--"a little faded and diluted, and with a
pensive tinge." "It almost amounts to a disease," he reflects, "this
homesickness which home cannot cure--a strange complaint. Sometimes when
away from the old scenes it seems as if I must go back to them, as if I
should find the old contentment and satisfaction there in the circle
of the hills. But I know I should not--the soul's thirst can never be
slaked. My hunger is the hunger of the imagination. Bring all my dead
back again, and place me amid them in the old home, and a vague longing
and regret would still possess me."
As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal: "Indeed,
the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as
if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man.
As time passes, the world becomes more and more a Golgotha,--a place
of graves,--even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and
kindred. The days do not merely pass, we bury them; they are of us,
like us, and in them we bury our own image, a real part of ourselves."
Perhaps, among the poems of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses
that have the most universal appeal are those of--