to cherish the remembrance of that young master—­with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents.  I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ’s and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep.  I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood.—­God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed!  Thou art sophisticated.—­I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—­how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful!  From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself—­and not some dissembling guardian presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy.  Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite?  If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—­(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.—­In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy.  Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me.  Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.  He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.  But now, shall I confess a truth?—­I feel these audits but too powerfully.  I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser’s farthings.  In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel.  I am not content to pass away “like a weaver’s shuttle.”  Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality.  I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.  I