these remembrance comes full upon us, and that we feel how
little our intentions have swayed our career or influenced our actions;
the aspirations, the resolves of youth, are either looked upon as puerile
follies, or a most distant day settled on for their realization. The
principles we fondly looked to, like our guide-stars, are dimly visible,
not seen; the friends we cherished are changed and gone; the scenes
themselves seem no longer the sunshine and the shade we loved; and, in
fact, we are living in a new world, where our own altered condition gives
the type to all around us; the only link that binds us to the past being
that same memory that like a sad curfew tolls the twilight of our fairest
dreams and most cherished wishes.

That these glimpses of the bygone season of our youth should be but fitful
and passing--tinging, not coloring the landscape of our life--we should be
engaged in all the active bustle and turmoil of the world, surrounded by
objects of hope, love, and ambition, stemming the strong tide in whose
fountain is fortune.

He, however, who lives apart, a dreary and a passionless existence, will
find that in the past, more than in the future, his thoughts have found
their resting-place; memory usurps the place of hope, and he travels
through life like one walking onward; his eyes still turning towards some
loved forsaken spot, teeming with all the associations of his happiest
hours, and preserving, even in distance, the outline that he loved.

Distance in time, as in space, smooths down all the inequalities of
surface; and as the cragged and rugged mountain, darkened by cliff and
precipice, shows to the far-off traveller but some blue and misty mass,
so the long-lost-sight-of hours lose all the cares and griefs that tinged
them, and to our mental eye, are but objects of uniform loveliness and
beauty; and if we do not think of

"The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,"

it is because, like April showers, they but checker the spring of our
existence.

For myself, baffled in hope at a period when most men but begin to feel it,
I thought myself much older than I really was; the disappointments of the
world, like the storms of the ocean, impart a false sense of experience to
the young heart, as he sails forth upon his voyage; and it is an easy error
to mistake trials for time.

The goods of fortune by which I was surrounded, took nothing from the
bitterness of my retrospect; on the contr