But these things have nothing to
do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions
that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your
life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear
the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret
music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that
response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so
everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences
which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An
old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a
tone of voice, a curve in the path--everything comes to us weighted with
its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.
It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember
facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience.
Macaulay could recite _Paradise Lost_, while Rossetti was a little doubtful
whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round the sun.
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