The Virginian

Retrospection.—There is something inexpressibly sweet in the retrospect of days gone by. When memory, ever active, carries us back to the scenes in which we passed our boyhood, and places us once more in the midst of the gay circle of our earliest friends, and calls around us a thousand circumstances in all their minutiae, which crowded on our youthful hours, we feel new born upon the lap of time, and almost fancy ourselves once more sporting in the spring time of our being. Fancy, for a moment, strips us of our grey hairs, and crowns our brows with garlands, and invigorates our enervated limbs, and pours new life and elasticity into our flagging spirits. And though this retrospect be blended with some shades of sorrow, and though recollection recalls many and still deeper shades of melancholy to tinge the skies of late summers, we gaze to that one bright spot on the arena of our existence, with still livelier emotions—as one who on a desert coast, where all around is barren and joyless, turns his weary eye to where, in the far off heavens, one little star twinkles through the gathered clouds.

Have you ever met an associate of your juvenile days, after years of separation, without feeling these sensations? Have you ever gazed on the grass grown grave of one whom in youth you loved, without feeling your own kindred to the tomb, and half rejoicing that all who have gone before you to its silent mansions are not strangers; that friends whose countenances you remember and whose affections you once shared are there?

These are the sensations awakened by retrospection in minds feelingly alive to the tenderest connexions of life, and sensible of its narrow and uncertain limits. Burns felt thus when he thought of the banks of Ayre, and the grave of his highland Mary, whither his muse so often wandered.