Ii — Reminiscence
“Heaven’s exile straying from the orb of light.”
And but for our surface and distracted lives,—lived here for the most part in the senses,—we should have never lost the consciousness of our descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion—some more, some less—it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent into the flesh and decease out of it.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
Nor yet in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.”
None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into recollections which these can neither date nor confine—the smiles that welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor time.
“O love! thou makest all things even
In earth and heaven:
Finding thy way through prison bars
Up to the stars:
Or true to the Almighty plan
That out of dust created man,
Thou lookest in a grave, to see
Thine immortality.”