It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life—­the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight something—­a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or an eyelid—­that she is at least beginning to love him in return....So unless our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory, we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother’s bosom or rode on our father’s back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, or as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up into the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination as we can only believe in the joy of childhood.  But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed in a far-off hour of happiness.  It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

MIDNIGHT IN THE CITY.

[From Sartor Resartus.]

“Ach, mein Lieber!” said he once, at midnight, when we had returned from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, “it is a true sublimity to dwell here.  These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of night, what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?  That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad:  that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven!  O, under that hideous coverlet of vapours and putrefactions and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid!  The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born:  men are praying,—­on the other side of a brick partition men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night.  The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw:  in obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard, hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men.  The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down to fly with him over the borders:  the Thief, still more silently, sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first