During the summer holidays I returned to my little native city.  What joy in these meetings again!  No one has explained it, but in this seeing and finding again, and in these self-memories, lie the real secrets of all joy and pleasure.  What we see, hear or taste for the first time may be beautiful, grand and agreeable, but it is too new.  It overpowers, but gives no repose, and the fatigue of enjoying is greater than the enjoyment itself.  To hear again, years afterward, an old melody, every note of which we supposed we had forgotten, and yet to recognize it as an old acquaintance; or, after the lapse of many years, to stand once more before the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, and experience afresh all the emotions which the infinite look of the child aroused in us for years; or to smell a flower or taste a dish again which we have not thought of since childhood—­all these produce such an intense charm that we do not know which we enjoy most, the actual pleasure or the old memory.  So when we return again, after long absence, to our birth-place, the soul floats unconsciously in a sea of memories, and the dancing waves dreamily toss themselves upon the shores of times long passed.  The belfry clock strikes and we fear we shall be late to school, and recovering from this fear feel relieved that our anxiety is over.  The same dog runs along the street on whose account we used to go far out of our way.  Here sits the old huckster whose apples often led us into temptation, and even now, we fancy they must taste better than all other apples in the world, notwithstanding the dust on them.  There one has torn down a house and built a new one.  Here the old music-teacher lived.  He is dead—­and yet how beautiful it seemed as we stood and listened on summer evenings under the window while the True Soul, when the hours of the day were over, indulged in his own enjoyment and played fantasies, like the roaring and hissing engine letting off the steam which has accumulated during the day.  Here in this little leafy lane, which seemed at that time so much larger, as I was coming home late one evening, I met our neighbor’s beautiful daughter.  At that time I had never ventured to look at or address her, but we school-children often spoke of her and called her “the Beautiful Maiden,” and whenever I saw her passing along the street at a distance I was so happy that I could only think of the time when I should meet her nearer.  Here in this leafy walk which leads to the church-yard, I met her one evening and she took me by the arm, although we had never spoken together before, and asked me to go home with her.  I believe neither of us spoke a word the whole way; but I was so happy that even now, after all these years, I wish it were that evening, and that I could go home again, silently and blissfully, with “the Beautiful Maiden.”

Thus one memory follows another until the waves dash together over our heads, and a deep sigh swells the breast, which warns us that we have forgotten to breathe in the midst of these pure thoughts.  Then all at once, the whole dream-world vanishes, like uprisen ghosts at the crowing of the cock.