Although there is something chilling in that sad, inevitable word, the past—although in looking through the thronged rolls of history, and reading of all the dead passions, the fruitless anxieties, the vain, unproductive yearnings of beings that were once as full of thrilling life and feeling as ourselves, and now are nothing, we gain but the cold moral of our own littleness—still the very indistinctness of the distance softens and beautifies the objects of a former epoch that we thus look back upon; and in the far retrospect of the days gone by, a thousand bright and glistening spots stand out, and catch the last most brilliant rays of a sun that has long set to the multitude of smaller things around them.