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.
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