us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the
air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years
ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage--the mechanical
instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the
modeling hand--galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors. The
long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own
wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humors and
irrational persistence.

It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life--the
time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by
a slight something--a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or
an eyelid--that she is at least beginning to love him in return....So
unless our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory, we can never
recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or
rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up
into our nature, or as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up
into the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our
imagination as we can only _believe_ in the joy of childhood. But the
first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to
the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as
the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed in a far-off hour of
happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to
tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last
keenness to the agony of despair.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

MIDNIGHT IN THE CITY.

[From _Sartor Resartus_.]

"_Ach, mein Lieber!_" said he once, at midnight, when we had returned
from the Coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to
dwell here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up through smoke and
thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of night,
what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when
Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still
rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls
roofed-in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and
Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad: that hum, I
say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is hear