I shall be some
time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old
cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I will come among
ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell Ch----, dry, sarcastic,
and friendly! Do----, mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly! Pl----,
officious to do, and to volunteer, good services!--and thou, thou
dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old,
stately House of Merchants; with thy labyrinthine passages, and
light-excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one half the year
supplied the place of the sun's light; unhealthy contributor to my
weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell! In thee remain, and not
in the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my "works!"
There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy
shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as
useful! My mantle I bequeath among ye.

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communication. At
that period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had not reached it.
I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of
the first flutter was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the dazzle
to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth,
as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a
poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some
revolution returned upon the world. I am now as if I had never been
other than my own master. It is natural to me to go where I please,
to do what I please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in
Bond-street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there
at that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a
book-stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is
nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture
in a morning. Was it ever otherwise? What is become of Fish-street
Hill? Where is Fenchurch-street? Stones of old Mincing-lane, which I
have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years, to the
footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now
vocal? I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is Change time, and
I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I
ventured to compare the change in my condition to a passing into
another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all
distinction of season. I do not know the day of the w