The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things come to an end."

There is something artificial about the soft sadness that one feels, and yet it is perfectly natural and instinctive; it is not as if I were melancholy or unhappy; my life is full of active enjoyment, and I am in that mood of delightful tranquillity which comes of having finished a tiresome series of engagements which I had anticipated without pleasure. It is not the sense only of vanished days; nor is it the sense of not having realised their joyfulness at the time; it is a deeper regret than that; it is the shadow of the uncertainty as to what will ultimately become of our individuality.