Ghosts I Have Seen

In the present one lives no longer from day to day, but from hour to hour, and even a fleeting memory of the joys that are no more refreshes the soul wearied, and fainting with a pallid anxiety that wraithlike envelops the whole being in a thrall of sadness. To-day I heard music which I had known and loved in the happy, careless long ago, and whilst I was lost in a dream of half-forgotten bliss I smelt the fragrance of mimosa flower. I cannot describe the sensations of joy that thrilled through my whole being. An involuntary moving of the spirit, an emergence into a dream world, described by the Greeks as ecstasy. The music fashioned the invisible link, and I was back again on a hillside where the mimosa grew in native abundance. Now, one thinks of France only as a hideous battle plain, but memory, the true dispensator of time, is never bound by years. She keeps ever fresh, in glowing colors, those ideal moments that gather up the utter joys of life into one divine sheaf of memory.