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Paid a visit to the th.
While waiting for the key walked alone up & down before the building
— looking at every tree & path & every building
with the same interest we look into a friend's eyes who is talking to us. The
natural objects are all there — the same great oaks — the
steps — the turf. Things are so little changed & yet so
greatly. So much is gone — & so much remains. I never walk
thro' those grounds without pangs of heart. There are some doors &
windows in which I seem to see a familiar face & form —
"the touch of a vanished hand,
And
the sound of a voice that is still"
— yes there are some things that are
indelible, immortal, & we never feel this more keenly than in such
moments — looking at the apparently longer-lived natural objects
— that stand & live & bloom — &
flourish while the love & hope & thousand tender memories
associated with them — the voices & faces that haunt them
seem passed forever; even then when nature seems to mock us with her
immutability & steadfastness compared with our changing fading, dying
lot, even then we feel that these things that
surround us are nothing substantial as they appear, it is they that are to perish & to pass into nothing, —
but Love is immortal the memory of it is indelible
—
I repeated these lines over & over as I paced up & down that familiar ground — looking here, looking there, as if for some traces of him to be found yet.