of all human events the most lawfully festal, yet
needs something of effort to chase away the boding sadness which settles
unavoidably upon any new career; the promise is vague, but new hopes
have created new dangers, and responsibilities contracted perhaps with
rapture are charged with menace.

For every one of us, male or female, there is a year of crisis--a year
of solemn and conscious transition, a year in which the light-hearted
sense of the _irresponsible_ ceases to gild the heavenly dawn. A year
there is, settled by no law or usage, for me perhaps the eighteenth, for
you the seventeenth, for another the nineteenth, within the gates of
which, underneath the gloomy archway of which, sits a phantom of
yourself.

Turn a screw, tighten a linch-pin--which is not to disease, but perhaps
to exalt, the mighty machinery of the brain--and the Infinities appear,
before which the tranquillity of man unsettles, the gracious forms of
life depart, and the ghostly enters. So profoundly is this true, that
oftentimes I have said of my own tremendous experience in this
region--destined too certainly, I fear, finally to swallow up intellect
and the life of life in the heart, unless God of His mercy fetches me
away by some sudden death--that death, considered as an entrance to this
ghostly world, is but a postern-gate by comparison with the
heaven-aspiring vestibule through which this world of the Infinite
introduces the ghostly world.

Time, if it does not diminish grief, alters its character. At first we
stretch out our hands in very blindness of heart, as if trying to draw
back again those whom we have lost. But, after a season, when the
impotence of such efforts has become too sensibly felt, finding that
they will not come back to us, a strange fascination arises which yearns
after some mode of going to _them_. There is a gulf fixed which
childhood rarely can pass. But we link our wishes with whatsoever would
gently waft us over. We stretch out our hands, and say, 'Sister, lend us
thy help, and plead for us with God, that we may pass over without much
agony.'

The joy of an infant, or joy-generation, without significance to an
unprofound and common mind--how strange to see the excess of pathos in
that; yet men of any (or at least of much) sensibility see in this a
transpicuous masque for another form, viz., the eternal ground of sorrow
in all human hearts. This, by the way, in an essay on William
Wordsworth, should be