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It is easy to see how boys brought up in an atmosphere like this, rich in traditions of the long-past in which the early settlement of the country figured, should become imbued with the same spirit of adventure that had brought their fathers from the older States to this new region of the West.
Alas, I am to eternally suffer for a fault committed twenty years ago; have I not already been more than adequately punished? And does it become you to be constantly reproaching me with my long-past imprudence? You have no right to be thus harassing me, till I dare not say my life is my own!
Consequently we find the democratic tendency which manifested itself with the outbreak of the Revolution giving place a few years later to the political reaction which found expression in our present Constitution. "The United States are the offspring of a long-past age.
They stood about us to say good-by, or to tell us some last bit of the news of their long-past youth dear, wrinkled faces framed in broad lines of bonnet or hood, and smiling, every one. "This gray shawl I got on me is the very one I used to wrap Amy in to carry her through the cold hall," said Grandma Holly. "My land-a-livin'! seems's if I'd been with her to-night, over again!"
I mean, at least, to fulfil her last wishes, and it is on account of one of them that I am writing to you. "You know that my mother was never quite pleased at my keeping at home the portrait of her who was my first and only love. She would have preferred that my eyes did not recall so often to my heart the recollection of my long-past sorrows. I withstood her.
Had there been any danger of this sort, which with young men who profess themselves ultra-liberal is usually the case, she would have joined in his guardian's apprehensions; but in fact Beauclerc, instead of being "le philosophe sans le savoir," was "le bon enfant sans le savoir;" for, while he questioned the rule of right in all his principles, and while they were held in abeyance, his good habits, and good natural disposition held fast and stood him in stead; while Lady Davenant, by slow degrees, brought him to define his terms, and presently to see that he had been merely saying old things in new words, and that the systems which had dazzled him as novelties were old to older eyes; in short, that he was merely a resurrectionist of obsolete heresies, which had been gone over and over again at various long-past periods, and over and over again abandoned by the common sense of mankind: so that, after puzzling and wandering a weary way in the dark labyrinth he had most ingeniously made for himself, he saw light, followed it, and at length, making his way out, was surprised, and sorry perhaps to perceive that it was the common light of day.
In glass cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches, things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past race.
Behind all these one sensed the glamour of a long-past romance, the unquenched spark of a faith that, as Lady Arabella had herself once put it in a rare moment of self-revelation, "love is the best thing this queer old world of ours has to offer." The portrait on the easel was that of a woman who had visioned the miracle of love only to be robbed of its fulfilment.
The room had become chilly while she had been counting out and throwing down her money, so she stirred her already glowing fire, and sat down right before it but not to stretch her lace; like Mary Hodgson, she began to think over long-past days, on softening remembrances of the dead and gone, on words long forgotten, on holy stories heard at her mother's knee.
Those dreary months that dragged between the present and his first disappointment had served as foundations for new developments of character in the man. He existed through a period of unutterable despair and loneliness; then the fruits of bygone battles fought and won came to his aid, and long-past years of self-denial and self-control fortified his spirit.
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