There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with any animation or interest, if we have had any constant or even fitful desire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the strange adventure of life, a time, I say, when we may look back a little, not sentimentally or with any hope of making out an impressive case for ourselves and interrogate the memory as to what have been the most real, vivid and intense things that have befallen us by the way. We may try to separate the momentous from the trivial and the important from the unimportant; to discern where and how and when we might have acted differently; to see and to say what has really mattered, what has made a deep mark on our spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed us. Because one of the strangest things about life seems to be our incapacity to decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real and fruitful joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The things that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and aim, seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks and phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut in the pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what glowing and emotional moment they were the record!

Author Biography

Arthur Christopher Benson (1862 - 1925) was an English essayist, poet, author and academic and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is noted for writing the words of the song "Land of Hope and Glory." From 1885 to 1903 he taught at Eton, returning to Cambridge in 1904 as a Fellow of Magdalene College to lecture in English Literature. He became president of the college in 1912 and Master of Magdalene in December 1915, a post he held until his death in 1925. From 1906, he was a governor of Gresham's School. The modern development of Magdalene was shaped by Benson. He was a generous benefactor to the college with a significant impact on the modern appearance of the college grounds; at least twenty inscriptions around the college refer to him. In 1930, Benson Court was constructed and named after him. Like his brothers Edward Frederic (E. F.) and Robert Hugh (R. H.), A. C. Benson was noted as an author of ghost stories. The bulk of his published ghost stories in the two volumes The Hill of Trouble and Other Stories (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) were written as moral allegories for his pupils.