ught out of the silver
found in the mines of the Harz mountains, and had been the property
of the very personage who had supplied them with a subject for
conversation. And having so said, he led the way through many a dusky
and winding passage, now ascending, and anon descending again, until he
came to the apartment destined for his young guest.

CHAPTER TENTH.

When midnight o'er the moonless skies
Her pall of transient death has spread,
When mortals sleep, when spectres rise,
And none are wakeful but the dead;
No bloodless shape my way pursues,
No sheeted ghost my couch annoys,
Visions more sad my fancy views,--
Visions of long departed joys.
W. R. Spenser.

When they reached the Green Room, as it was called, Oldbuck placed the
candle on the toilet table, before a huge mirror with a black japanned
frame, surrounded by dressing-boxes of the same, and looked around him
with something of a disturbed expression of countenance. "I am seldom
in this apartment," he said, "and never without yielding to a melancholy
feeling--not, of course, on account of the childish nonsense that Grizel
was telling you, but owing to circumstances of an early and unhappy
attachment. It is at such moments as these, Mr. Lovel, that we feel the
changes of time. The same objects are before us--those inanimate things
which we have gazed on in wayward infancy and impetuous youth, in
anxious and scheming manhood--they are permanent and the same; but when
we look upon them in cold unfeeling old age, can we, changed in our
temper, our pursuits, our feelings--changed in our form, our limbs, and
our strength,--can we be ourselves called the same? or do we not rather
look back with a sort of wonder upon our former selves, as being
separate and distinct from what we now are? The philosopher who appealed
from Philip inflamed with wine to Philip in his hours of sobriety, did
not choose a judge so different, as if he had appealed from Philip in
his youth to Philip in his old age. I cannot but be touched with the
feeling so beautifully expressed in a poem which I have heard repeated:*

*Probably Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads had not as yet been published.

My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,