"Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!

I mind me of a time that 's gone,
When here I'd sit as now I'm sitting,
In this same place, but not alone.
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me,
There's no one now to share my cup."

In one of the latest "Roundabouts" we have this touching confession: "I own for my part that, in reading pages which this hand penned formerly, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes. It is not the words I see; but that past day; that by-gone page of life's history; that tragedy, comedy it may be, which our little home-company was enacting; that merrymaking which we shared; that funeral which we followed; that bitter, bitter grief which we buried." But all who knew him know well, and love to recall, how these sorrows were soothed and his home made a place of happiness by his two daughters and his mother, who were his perpetual companions, delights, and blessings, and whose feeling of inestimable loss now will be best borne and comforted by remembering how they were everything to him, as he was to them.

His sense of a higher Power, his reverence and godly fear, is felt more than expressed as indeed it mainly should always be—in everything he wrote. It comes out at times quite suddenly, and stops at once, in its full strength. We could readily give many instances of this. One we give, as it occurs very early, when he was probably little more than sixand-twenty; it is from the paper, "Madam Sand and the New Apocalypse." Referring to Henri Heine's frightful words, "Dieu qui se meurt," "Dieu est mort," and to the wild godlessness of "Spiridion," he thus bursts out: "O awful, awful name of God! Light unbearable! mystery unfathomable! vastness immeasurable ! Who are these who come forward to explain the mystery, and gaze unblinking into the depths of the light, and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O name, that God's people of old did fear to utter ! O light that God's prophet would have perished had he seen!

who are these now so familiar with it?" In ordinary intercourse the same sudden "Te Deum" would occur, always brief and intense, like lightning from a cloudless heaven; he seemed almost ashamed, not of it, but of his giving it expression.

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road to the west of Edinburgh, one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening, —such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things, of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour.

There is a passage at the close of the "Roundabout Paper," No. XXIII., “De Finibus," in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked: the whole paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the passage, as if bidding it and all else good-night. He will be in bed, his candle out, and in darkness, in five minutes, and his shoes found next morning at his door, the little potentate all the while in his final sleep. The whole paper is worth the most careful study; it reveals not a little of his real nature, and un

folds very curiously the secret of his work, the vitality, and abiding power of his own creations; how he “invented a certain Costigan, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters," and met the original the other day, without surprise, in a tavern parlor. The following is beautiful : "Years ago I had a quarrel with a certain well-known person (I believed a statement regarding him which his friends imparted to me, and which turned out to be quite incorrect). To his dying day that quarrel was never quite made up. I said to his brother, 'Why is your brother's soul still dark against me? It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the wrong? Odisse quem læseris was never better contravened. But what we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far off : "Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from birth to the next world. Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation. Shall we continue this story-telling business, and be voluble to the end of our age?" "Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue?" And thus he ends:

“Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages; oh, the cares, the ennui, the squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again! But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a dear memory. Yet a few chapters more, and then the last; after which, behold Finis itself comes to an end, and the Infinite begins."

He sent the proof of this paper to his "dear neighbors,” in Onslow Square, to whom he owed so much almost daily pleasure, with his corrections, the whole of the last paragraph in manuscript, and above a first sketch of it also in MS., which is fuller and more impassioned. His fear of "enthusiastic writing” had led him, we think, to sacrifice something of the sacred power of his first words, which we give with its interlineations :

"Another Finis, another slice of life which Tempus edax has devoured! And I may have to write the word once or

twice perhaps, and then an end of Ends. Finite is over, and Infinite beginning. Oh the troubles, the cares, the ennui, the

disputes,

complications, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and there and oh the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever remembered! And then A few chapters more, and then the last, and then behold Finis itself coming to an end and the Infinite beginning!"

How like music this, like one trying the same air in different ways; as it were, searching out and sounding all its depths. "The dear, the brief, the forever remembered; these are like a bar out of Beethoven, deep and melancholy as the sea! He had been suffering on Sunday from an old and cruel enemy. He fixed with his friend and surgeon to come again on Tuesday; but with that dread of anticipated pain, which is a common condition of sensibility and genius, he put him off with a note from "yours unfaithfully, W. M. T.” ˆ He went out on Wednesday for a little, and came home at ten. He went to his room suffering much, but declining his man's offer to sit with him. He hated to make others suffer. He was heard moving, as if in pain, about twelve, on the eve of

"The happy morn,

Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King,
Of wedded maid, and virgin-mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring."

Then all was quiet, and then he must have died — in a mo-
ment. Next morning his man went in, and opening the win-
dows found his master dead, his arms behind his head, as if
he had tried to take one more breath. We think of him as of
our Chalmers; found dead in like manner; the same child-
like, unspoiled open face; the same gentle mouth
the same
spaciousness and softness of nature; the same look of power.
What a thing to think of, - his lying there alone in the dark,
in the midst of his own mighty London; his mother and his
daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his goodness.
God help them, and us all! What would become of us, stum-

bling along this our path of life, if we could not, at our utmost need, stay ourselves on Him?

Long years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time. It was found after death how little life he had to live. He looked always fresh with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost infantine face, but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty years. With him it is the end of Ends; finite is over, and infinite begun. What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller:

"Who knows the inscrutable design?

Blessed be He who took and gave!

Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
Be weeping at her darling's grave?
We bow to Heaven that willed it so,
That darkly rules the fate of all,
That sends the respite or the blow,
That's free to give, or to recall.”

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF THACKERAY.

"You have asked me to give you my recollections of Thackeray, but not, I trust, with the expectation that they would consist of a string of piquant anecdotes and witticisms, or contain any new and striking revelations in regard to his life or character. For the former object a better memory and more pointed pen - perhaps I might rather say, a more active imagination than mine would be required, and for the latter a more extended and intimate knowledge of the man.

I saw him for the first time a day or two after his arrival in America on his first visit, and I saw him for the last time a few weeks before his death.

“Like the rest of the world, I had exclaimed, on reading the opening chapters of 'Vanity Fair,' 'Fielding redivivus !' and it was therefore with a feeling of curiosity and elation, the capacity for which has been seriously impaired by time, that I accepted the invitation of a friend, himself a man of eminence in the world of letters, to meet the author who had given me so much delight, and whose fame had just reached its zenith.