monosyllable--gone?

Say it to yourself at nightfall, when the sun has sunk under the hills,
and the crickets chirp,--"gone." Say it to yourself when the night is
far over, and you wake with some sudden start from pleasant
dreams,--"gone." Say it to yourself in some country churchyard, where
your father, or your mother, sleeps under the blooming violets of
spring,--"gone." Say it in your sobbing prayer to Heaven, as you cling
lovingly, but oh, how vainly, to the hand of your sweet wife,--"gone!"

Ay, is there not meaning in it? And now, what is gone,--or rather what
is not gone? Childhood is gone, with all its blushes and fairness,--with
all its health and wantoning,--with all its smiles like glimpses of
heaven, and all its tears which were but the suffusion of joy.

Youth is gone,--bright, hopeful youth, when you counted the years with
jewelled numbers, and hung lamps of ambition on your path, which lighted
the palace of renown; when the days were woven into weeks of blithe
labor, and the weeks were rolled into harvest months of triumph, and the
months were bound into golden sheaves of years,--all gone!

The strength and pride of manhood is gone; your heart and soul have
stamped their deepest dye; the time of power is past; your manliness has
told its tale henceforth your career is _down_;--hitherto you have
journeyed _up_. You look back upon a decade as you once looked upon a
half score of months; a year has become to your slackened memory, and to
your dull perceptions, like a week of childhood. Suddenly and swiftly
come past you great whirls of gone-by thought, and wrecks of vain labor,
eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines
of life, that lay once before the vision,--rolling into wide billows of
years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,--now seem close-packed
together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy
heights,--like Alpine fastnesses,--parted with glaciers of grief, and
leaking abundant tears!

Your friends are gone; they who counselled and advised you, and who
protected your weakness, will guard it no more forever. One by one they
have dropped away as you have journeyed on; and yet your journey does
not seem a long one. Life at the longest is but a bubble that bursts so
soon as it is rounded.

Nelly--your sweet sister, to whom your heart clung so fondly in the
young days, and to whom it has clung ever since in the strongest bonds
of companionship--