The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from North Wales.  It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found it contained a bit of seaweed.  The thought that prompted the sender was friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea, and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to extravagance could not be dodged.  “Oh, how it smells of Sheringham,” said one whose vote is always for the East Coast.  “No, there is the smack of Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume,” said another, whose passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon.  And so on, each finding, as he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to the foam of summer seas.  And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide of recollection—­memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore.  All awakened by the smell of a bit of seaweed.

It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of intimacies and confidences.  There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance.  We open a drawer by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:—­

    We tread the path their feet have worn. 
    We sit beneath their orchard trees,
    We hear, like them, the hum of bees,
    And rustle of the bladed corn.

Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain?  The memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the assurance of all the springs to come.  They link us up with the pageant of nature, and with the immortals of our kind—­with Wordsworth watching them in “sprightly dance” by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them “in the sweet o’ the year” by Avon’s banks long centuries ago.

And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is infinite variety.  It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a personal memory.  That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness that belongs to all of us.  Everything speaks a private language