am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.  I would set up my tabernacle here.  I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends:  to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer.  I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.—­Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me.  My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood.  They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores.  A new state of being staggers me.  Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—­do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces?  Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here,—­the recognisable face—­the “sweet assurance of a look”—?

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying—­to give it its mildest name—­does more especially haunt and beset me.  In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic.  At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality.  Then we expand and burgeon.  Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller.  The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death.  All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances,—­that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus’ sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles:—­I am none of her minions—­I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind.  All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore.—­I have heard some profess an indifference to life.  Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow.  Some have wooed death—­but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom!  I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of!  In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive!’