is felt with a far more exquisite sensibility than can ever be experienced by those to whom each day brings a new guest, and whose memories, like the waxen tablet of the ancients, is ready each moment to receive a new impression.

These partings, when will they cease? or cease to be regretted because they can be at pleasure eternally renewed? But in this world, and at our age, I cannot help thinking, whenever we part, of what Cowper says so pathetically, that "the robin red-breast may be chirping on the grave of one of us before the winter is over. I sometimes envy the patriarchs their longevity, who could, without absurdity, invite a friend to pay a visit, "if all be well," half a century, or, for the matter of that, two centuries hence, and at sixty bespeak the honour and pleasure, “if nothing happened," of your company at their three hundred and fiftieth birthday!— at all events, when they did meet, could speak not only of an ancient friendship of thirty or forty years, as we poor ephemerals so complacently do, but of one of five or six centuries! Terribly long-winded, though, depend upon it, must have been some of those stories which the old gentlemen told over a winter fire; I imagine Methuselah's youngest son, a stripling of eighty or so, must often have anticipated the maxim of Montaigne, "Les vieillards sont dangereux." No doubt, he often quietly slipped out of the room just as the patriarch began that desperately tough affair of his "first love," when he was a gay youth of just one hundred. Cannot you imagine the ancient, surrounded with his great-great-great-great-grandchildren, to the seventh or eighth generation, in a small family party of seven hundred and forty-five, all assembled to celebrate his eight hundred and fifty-first birthday! What prodigious lapses of time, methinks, would the old gentleman be apt to deal with; - how he remembered something four hundred and fifty years ago, 66 come next fall," as well as if it happened "yesterday;" how he remembered it very well, because his eldest daughter's great-grandchild's fifth daughter's son's nephew was then a little lad of forty years of age, and died of the measles!

Yet, on second thoughts, it seems irreverent thus to talk of the imagined prosiness of him on whose silver hairs we should have

looked as on the snowy summit of Mont Blanc; whose eyes had gazed on those of Adam; who could tell us traditions of the young beauty of Eve, and carry us back to the memories of the world's dawn!

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But would even patriarchal longevity suffice us? I trow not. Even that must come to an end; and if we were to live not only as long as Methuselah, but as long as Voltaire's little man of Saturn, whose term was 30,000 years, or even as "Micromegas" himself, we should still say, "This, you see, is just to be admitted to a glimpse of the world; we are doomed to die, as one may say, the moment we are born." No question but Methuselah himself often read sage lessons in his nine hundredth year on the extreme brevity and vanity of human life, and told his descendants, when near a thousand, that his days were but “ as a shadow," and as a dream in the night." What then the remedy? Ah! my friend, how these partings make one long for that immortality in which there shall be none, or none that shall be attended with regrets; because we shall be assured that after a little interval - yes, for even if separation be for a thousand years, it will be little in comparison with eternal duration - we shall meet in joy again, and friendship know no death. Strange, glorious issue of things! when friends shall bid each other farewell, even for five hundred years, with an unmoistened eye: set out, on a little tour of some small portion of the universe (to visit Cassiopeia, for example, or Orion, for two or three centuries), and come back, still to find the charmed home circle unbroken, the "immortal amaranth" still mantling the porch with its unfading leaf, and gardens ever verdant, because there "eternal summer dwells."

Mystery of mysteries! that human folly should ever forego these enchanting hopes, and count itself " unworthy of eternal life: still greater mystery, that sin should ever induce us to do any thing to forfeit them! Yet, in truth, the latter mystery will enable us to comprehend the former; for the fact that man is such a fool as to imperil immortal delight for momentary gratifications, too well explains his apathy. Apart from the consciousness of demerit, there is not a human being who would not, amidst the sorrows and separations of this world, sooner part with any thing

than the hopes-even though they be faint-of immortality. Let a future life be only matter of guesses and conjectures, yet, if man thought that the sole alternatives it presented were Nothing or "eternal happiness," you would see all mankind true to the principles on which they generally act, and believing as the will directed them. Yes, ready to knock anybody on the head who but whispered a doubt of that fair reversion which man's hopes would soon teach him to convert into certainty.

Strange that any one for the sake of a little gain, or a profitable lie, or the momentary gratification of any passion or appetite whatever, should do any thing to cloud such bright hopes, which surely, even if delusive, are, so long as they are believed, by far the most solid and precious of all our pleasures! May you and I, my friend, seek, in the only right way, the realisation of these hopes, and every day earnestly strive to render ourselves less strange to the scenes which await us, by foregoing every appetite and passion which is inconsistent with them. We shall then at length greet each other, I doubt not, in that world where we shall either part no more, or part and meet, and meet and part without end; meet with ever fresh delight, and part without fear or sorrow; where "farewell -no empty wish-will always fulfil itself, and "welcome" will be repeated for ever.

Yours ever,

R. E. H. G,

LETTER XXX.

To a friend who had narrowly escaped spending a night in St. Alban's Abbey.*

My dear Friend,

Far from laughing at you for that pit-a-pat at the heart as 'you saw the gleam of sunlight lessening in the great western door of the Abbey, and thought you were in for an autumnal night in

* Finding the door open, he had wandered in one autumn afternoon, and, lost in thought, was musing in the ancient pile, when he heard steps near the distant door. He turned, and had just time to call to the vanishing figures. A minute later, and he would have been shut in all night.

the dreary pile (standing so isolated, that by no possibility could you have made your voice heard), I assure you, I quite felt for you, and was conscious of a sympathetic pit-a-pat even at your description.

I think I have as much physical courage as most men, and perhaps more than the average moral courage; and yet I am so persuaded that mere courage, physical or moral, is impotent against the cumulative effects of imagination when that faculty is subjected to the continuous pressure of influences favourable to its unchecked activity, that I would not answer for myself, or for any man in the circumstances in which you seemed likely to be placed.

In truth, let the imagination be ever so feeble, let it be with or without culture, still I believe fully that its latent energies may, under the operation of novel, impressive, and sufficiently persistent influences, be roused into such intense action, as to overmaster every other faculty; subdue not only reason and judgment by ideal terrors, but impose laws on sensation itself; make the eyes see, and the ears hear, just what it pleases.

I dare say you may recollect reading of sentinels during the Peninsular war, who, having been stationed on the outskirts of the field after a day's skirmish, have been known to desert in the night, not from fear of living enemies, but from inability to endure the proximity of the dead! There lay the foe in the dread silence of his last sleep, and put his living foe to flight! I can easily imagine such a thing happening even to a brave man.

I remember, when a lad of sixteen, it used to be sometimes my lot to pass a remarkably dreary and isolated churchyard about a mile distant from a very ancient country town. Like some other ancient towns, it had gradually shifted its site and left its churchyard behind it, as if the dead and the living had quarrelled; no bad separation, by the way. If I were writing now to our worthy friend, the Rector of, I would maliciously suggest whether it might not be from antipathy to sermons that we thus find old towns sometimes hitching away from the church! At that time of life, an imputation of fear was my greatest fear.

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So, feeling ashamed of a certain uneasy consciousness of gladness when my horse had fairly turned the corner of the road which led into the churchyard, I resolved, one wild-looking, stormy November evening, to face and conquer this indefinite dread. I tied my horse to the gate which led into the charmed ground, and determined to walk fairly round it. I did so, and I need hardly say saw nothing; yet I will own to you that before I had made the circuit, the senses were sufficiently quickened to convince me that it only required sufficient time to make me see and hear any thing that imagination should choose to palm upon me. The melancholy autumn wind sighed and moaned with peculiar solemnity among the branches of the dark trees which edged the wall of the churchyard; and as it rustled in the long grass of the graves over which I stumbled, and made the sear leaves patter on the grave stones, I could almost fancy I heard the feet of supernatural visitants; the shimmering of a white tomb seen in the distant gloom looked like a "sheeted ghost; and as I was just getting round to the point which led straight to the churchyard gate, all at once, and without any reason or warning, I had a sort of vision, as my eyes rested on a large tomb, of a figure lifting its arm with a menacing gesture. It was, I doubt not, the fancy-transformed shape of some monumental sculpture; but it came with such startling suddenness that it left me without power of reasoning upon it. I made a strong effort to walk straight on, though quickening my pace, and was glad enough, I am not ashamed to say, to regain my horse's back, who, happily proof against all imagination, was quietly munching his grass, and, I dare say, wondering in his mind at the unreasonable hour I had chosen for my devotions!

I once had a friend who lost his way on one of the mountains of Cumberland one autumn evening; and fearful of walking down some precipice, and equally afraid of going to sleep, he paced out a little walk, before it became quite dark, and resolved to keep in motion to and fro on that sentinel's beat all night. He told me that as he looked at the giant peaks and the shadowy glens by the light of a waning moon, and listened to the distant roar of