That is, I believe, the analysis of the charm of such a scene; the
possibility of joy, and permanence, tinged with the pathos that it
has no continuance, but rises and falls and fades like a ripple in
the stream.
The disillusionment of experience is a very different thing from
the pathos of youth; for in youth the very sense of pathos is in
itself an added luxury of joy, giving it a delicate beauty which,
if it were not so evanescent, it could not possess.
But then comes the real trouble, the heavy anxiety, the illness,
the loss; and those things, which looked so romantic in the pages
of poets and the scenes of story-writers, turn out not to be
romantic at all, but frankly and plainly disagreeable and
intolerable things. The boy who swept down the shining reaches with
long, deft strokes becomes a man--money runs short, his children
give him anxiety, his wife becomes ailing and fretful, he has a
serious illness; and when after a day of pain he limps out in the
afternoon to the shadow of the old plane-tree, he must be a very
wise and tranquil and patient man, if he can still feel to the full
the sweet influences of the place, and be still absorbed and
comforted by them.
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