OLD ASSOCIATIONS. THERE is a subtile magic about old associations, which we do not care to attempt the difficult task of analyzing and comprehending; it is sufficient for us that it exists, and that we feel it exercising over us its witching attraction, and leading us back insensibly, and yet irresistibly, from the harshly-outlined, sharply-defined present, to the softened, mellowed image of the past. Old associations form by far the brightest page in memory, and the one that the heart is best satisfied to dwell on. We are never tired of reading in it, and following the suggestions by which, unconsciously to ourselves, we are tempted to trace the channels our lives have worn in the great track of time, from some simple incident to which ever and anon we, as by some mental magnetism, revert to find the source of emotions often hidden and latent, but which every now and then spring to life, waking us up like a trumpet call from a sordid dream, to live over again in the simple pleasures and pure delights which years have taken from us, and replaced by denser and sterner realities. [PRICE 13d. ship and love, for the garb in which they are clothed, the sentiments which would have excited but the smile of ridicule, or the laugh of disdain, had they been uttered by less polished lips and in a ruder strain. There is, indeed, a fount of poetry in every heart bubbling up from the well-spring of old associations, which embody the sentiment rather than the fact of the past, but which seldom find open utterance because of our conscious want of power so to clothe them as to attract the admiration of that legion of humanity which recognises and bows to splendour, but passes unheedingly by simple purity and sneers at rough truth. These old associations are the diamonds of the soul's mine of gems, but they lie there hidden with all their intrinsic worth, because the skill of the artist is wanted to polish and set them, and thus endow them with adventitious attractions. But the more we hide them the more we love them. The more our own breast seems the only home old associations have in the great world of ideas, the more are they welcomed and cherished there. The more unable we are to make the world receive them and love them the more we love them ourselves, the more they seem to become our own exclusive property, and to grow a part of our very being. And yet, when we find these secret thoughts greatly and grandly expressed in the pages of some gifted writer, how gladly we recognise them, and welcome them, and make the book our favourite; feeling, when we see the heart's loved idea invested by another with new beauty, as though a fond friend had been clad in angel's garb and become still dearer to us by the change. Probably there is engraved in the breast of every human being some circumstance of early life to which he or she constantly looks as the starting point of their conscious existence; and this will generally be found to be an unimportant trivial thing, so little, so unworthy of notice, that most of us hide it in our hearts as secretly as though we feared or were ashamed to let the world know from how small a spring the stream of thought and action which constantly pours out of us had since Old associations have a power peculiarly their own, then flowed on. And we are the more tempted to hide which appears to be in its fulness incommunicable and it, because it is more frequently something connected untransmissible, and in its action upon ourselves unacwith the heart and the feelings than with the intellect-countable and unlike any other influence. We look back something that appeals to sympathy rather than to sense -and while we scatter far and wide, and expose proudly to the gaze of all the riches of the mind, we (and particularly the more sensitive natures among us) hoard up to ourselves the treasures of the heart as strictly as a miser secretes his gains, as though they were too sacred for the eye of a cold, rough, hard-judging world; too fragile, and delicate, and tender to bear the wear and tear of practical life. Perhaps, too, we often hide our sympathies, not so much because we are ashamed of them, as because we feel our own inability to give them an adequate expression-because we feel our incompetence to clothe them in that gorgeous mental splendour which their soft loveliness and beauty seem to demand of us, and we have not the courage or the hardihood to expose them to the ridicule which might attend our mode of putting them forth. And so the world seldom gets at the heart's cherished revealings, except when some gifted spirit bursts out in a magnificent flood of poesy, and men then wor upon dangers braved, and difficulties successfully over- But beyond; or that old rhyme which used, long years ago, to be our lullaby; or that wild legend which on wintry nights the old nurse told us as we crouched in pleasant fear by the blazing fire; or that quiet murmuring brook fringed with the willows, each drooping to the bank, and leaving beneath an arbour shade, where the quiet rippling sounds of the waters has so often lulled us to a sleep rich with fairy visions. There is nothing in all these to be proud of; there are thousands of such trees where children lie now and watch the sun, and plenty of such wil-ment and refinement, and touches the heart and opens it low-fringed brooks where youth sleeps and dreams, as though the fairies had resumed their old dominion and were gilding the lips of the sleeper with tales of wealth and power, and love and pleasure; and every old crone tells the same ghost tales, and every nursery rings with the same lullaby rhyme; but yet they do not seem like those which so delightfully haunt our minds, and in which there must be something; for from the realities of pride and power the heart bounds back to their memory, like a spring released from a restraining force, and we cannot solve the mystery except by those two words "Old Associations." The power of old associations, indeed, over a favoured few would, if we could trace back great things to their small beginnings, be easily comprehended. Let us take an example. There is a picture exhibition, and the walls are hung with tinted canvas till they are a very rainbow of hues. Here a shepherd is piping to his flock from beneath the spreading boughs of the beech; there a ruin is tottering to destruction till it seems as though the next moment the gilded frame would be rent asunder and crushed beneath its fragments; here there is an old cathedral interior, with the reflected light from the painted windows tinting its ground, roof, and white robed priests and kneeling worshippers, and we almost hear the low murmurs of prayer and praise, and feel the vibrations of the sonorous organ-peal which is making the carved pillars thrill sympathetically to the sound; here again is a grotesque face of amazement or fear which brings the ready smile to the lips, and we say-how admirable! how beautiful! how grand! how natural! and admire them as great works of skill; but suddenly we come across a small painting in a neglected corner, before which we say nothing, but hold our breath in rapt feeling. It is but a sketch and few notice it, but for us it is all in all. The other canvases become blank and dark-that is the exhibition-the living soul of the whole, instinct with a poetic beauty which goes at once to the heart as though sense and feeling were suddenly blended into one. What is it? There is the old tree in the foreground-there on the left the cricket green-there the path leading to the brook-there the smoke curling over the tall tree-tops, speaking of home. The scene itself is there, it is no longer a painting; forgetting the long intervening past we live our former life again, and stand rapt before it till the attendant touches us and says that the hour of closing has come. Then we wake to feel the power of old associations, and to understand how their poetry and sentiment gives an artist dominion over the hearts of his fellows. Let us look again at another scene. Here is a spacious library, plain and simple, yet elegant in its style, compact and convenient, yet airy and healthful. The walls are covered with the works of the best authors, and men sit there gathering from the great minds of all times knowledge and goodness. It is such a place as we may hope in future years to see freely opened to, and filled by, the toiling millions of the land. Let us suppose that time come, and picture to ourselves the place and its tenants; let us seat ourselves beside the sunburnt-labourer there, whose hat is pulled low over his brow, and whose rough hand is sometimes brushed across his eyes, sometimes shades his face from sight, but not so completely that we cannot see the workings of hope, and fear, and sympathy in his weather-stained features. What is he reading? We peep over his shoulder and we see. A fiction too true to nature to be entirely false; and as he bends over its pages, a something springs up within him telling him of the old nurse's tale. True, there are other characters there, and the scenery glows upon him from the wellconstructed sentences, and the language is higher and more noble than aught he has heard before; but still the old association strikes him amid all the imagery and ornato pure and childlike feelings, and he loves not only the book but its author, whose effort was perhaps prompted by the same feelings as those which are working, without the power of finding utterance, in the heart of his humble admirer. So, too, of that other man, whose book by its measured lines shows that it is poetry; poetry, too, which it may be glides harmoniously along with the same halfmelancholy cadence as the lullaby of old-possibly was prompted by it. What think you, as he takes his eyes from off the pages and rests his head upon his hand, and looks upon the opposite wall as though he saw it not, he is dreaming of? It is unconsciously of an old association. He sits again upon the low stool at his mother's feet by the long deserted hearth-his mother's footstool, given to him as a special favour-and hears that low song with which she rocks her youngest born to rest, while he waits patiently for the oft-repeated tale, the same tale as the other man is now pondering on. Yes, the same influence of old association which prompted the fiction and the poem, and made their authors the mind-lights of thousands, would, could men see into each others' hearts, link these two readers together by the chain of a common sympathy; and if that may not be, it at least rubs out for a time the hard selfishness of the world, and makes them the more accessible to kindliness and goodness. Around them are men reading history, or travels, or science; their faces are calm and composed; the brow is sometimes wrinkled with thought, or contracted in the attempt to understand a problem, but it is impossible to estimate, though old associations are not acting upon them, how much they are indebted to those influences for the knowledge which is spread around them. The geologist might have received his bent of mind from some sparkling pebble picked up on the sea-shore; the traveller have dated his thirst for adventures from the reading of some Robinson Crusoe-like tales; the astronomer been directed to the heavens by a falling star seen long years ago; or the anatomist have had his youthful curiosity excited by some mouldering bones as he bounded over the tombs and graves of a country churchyard. In fact, so great is the power of old associations that it is hardly fanciful to attempt to trace to some one or more the course of the lives of most men; and probably, if we could dive into their hearts, we should find, too, that the first sensations which set free the springs of their after mental existence had in them less of self, of ambi❤ tion, of cold calculation, and more of sympathy and purer pleasure than ever followed the results of their more mature efforts; and that idea may, perhaps, serve to explain the after influence of the first thought, the first insight into human action, the first idea taking the form of melodious poetry; in fact, the after influence of old associations over the hearts of the philosopher, the novelist, the poet, and their fellow-labourers in life. It is needless to bid men to cherish old associations, because they cannot help doing so. They grow upon them and take a stronger hold every succeeding year, and when old age comes creeping on, and the pulse rises slowly, and the life-blood runs colder from the heart, and the limbs begin to fail; when the visions of youth and the hopes of early manhood, and the ambitions of maturer years are obliterated and annihilated, when the grave yawns grimly before, and the thin white hair hardly covers the shrunken skull, when the winter of life |