Reminiscences of Christopher Colles.
By John W. Francis.
How precious a boon is memory; how prolific of disquisition in the writings of the psychologist; how rich in associations when treated by the poet; how full of pleasures and of pains in him who has cherished this function of the mind by a proper observance of the laws of organic health, without which soundness of intellect is impaired, and our mental impressions resolved in a state of cloudiness, or lost in oblivion. As this great quality of the mind furnishes our most accurate knowledge; as by it we retain our power of recalling the various and numerous incidents of by-gone days, it summons our associations, as the occasion may demand, and yields gratification or suffering, according as life has been appropriated in furtherance of the proper destiny of our race. As retrospective reflections possess within themselves a permanence of impression denied to prospective views, and as time seems gradually to absorb the intensity of painful associations, the poet Rogers inculcates the belief, that as we advance in existence, past associations become less and less blended with sorrows, and unmixed gratification crowns the issue. It were well, indeed, could we be entirely confident of the truth of this theory of the mind. We must, however, leave it to the school-men to descant on, and to old heads to enjoy the fruition.
He who has passed a period of some three-score years and upward, some faithful Knickerbocker, for instance, native born, and ever a resident among us, whose tenacious memory enables him to meditate upon the thirty thousand inhabitants at the time of his birth with the almost oppressive population of some seven hundred thousand which the city at present contains; who contrasts the cheap and
