te heart by telling me she was near me;
and, obedient to the impulse given me by the wild fancy, I raised my
tremulous voice, broken long ago, and quavered an accompaniment, and I
and the unknown singer sang the last remaining stanza together.

I can never hear that song without tears. I never hear it, even though
its half-forgotten strains, dreamily warbled, are oddly mingled with a
widely different tune, in a bootless effort at remembrance; but my
youth, with its golden promise, which maturer manhood but meagrely
fulfilled, turns with the shadowed years veiling its brightness, and
looks sorrowfully upon my old age in its solitude and desolation; but my
life, with its wasted energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me,
darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have
been! O Heaven! what bitter years of suffering and crushing
disappointment, years on which the tracks of time have left their blight
and mildew, have passed since first I listened to the bird-like warbling
of its simple strains. Then was the blissful May-time of my existence,
when I was governed by youth's generous impulses, led captive by its
sweet delusions, when I fondly dreamed that my life was destined to
become a victory and a triumph, not the failure it has proved to be! I
heard it first when the love that has lived unchanged through the
mournful wastes of nearly half a century, was in the gray dawn of its
immortal being. _She_ sang it to me _then_, sweet Jennie Grey, whom I
wooed, but never won. Memory, faithful treasurer, points back with
mystic finger, and looking through the long vista of intervening years,
standing now almost where time shall merge into eternity, that vision
illuminating like a star the surrounding gloom, I can see the very
night--I can see _now_ as clearly as _then_--the round full moon
lighting the dark waters with a long line of silvery brightness,
crowning the tiny ripples with light as they broke upon the shore, and
flooding the well-remembered room with its mellow radiance--see her, in
her fresh young beauty, seated at the old instrument, the moonlight
falling on her bright hair; the sweet eyes averted from my too admiring
gaze, veiled beneath the drooping lashes, cast down with a coy pretence
of studying the half-forgotten tune.

I can see myself, handsome, ardent YOUNG (so widely different NOW, I can
speak of my former self without vanity), seated near, with all the love
that filled my soul f