Say it to yourself at nightfall, when the sun has sunk under the hills, and the crickets chirp,--"gone." Say it to yourself when the night is far over, and you wake with some sudden start from pleasant dreams,--"gone." Say it to yourself in some country churchyard, where your father, or your mother, sleeps under the blooming violets of spring,--"gone." Say it in your sobbing prayer to Heaven, as you cling lovingly, but oh, how vainly, to the hand of your sweet wife,--"gone!" Ay, is there not meaning in it? And now, what is gone,--or rather what is not gone? Childhood is gone, with all its blushes and fairness,--with all its health and wantoning,--with all its smiles like glimpses of heaven, and all its tears which were but the suffusion of joy. Youth is gone,--bright, hopeful youth, when you counted the years with jewelled numbers, and hung lamps of ambition on your path, which lighted the palace of renown; when the days were woven into weeks of blithe labor, and the weeks were rolled into harvest months of triumph, and the months were bound into golden sheaves of years,--all gone! The strength and pride of manhood is gone; your heart and soul have stamped their deepest dye; the time of power is past; your manliness has told its tale henceforth your career is _down_;--hitherto you have journeyed _up_. You look back upon a decade as you once looked upon a half score of months; a year has become to your slackened memory, and to your dull perceptions, like a week of childhood. Suddenly and swiftly come past you great whirls of gone-by thought, and wrecks of vain labor, eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines of life, that lay once before the vision,--rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,--now seem close-packed together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy heights,--like Alpine fastnesses,--parted with glaciers of grief, and leaking abundant tears! Your friends are gone; they who counselled and advised you, and who protected your weakness, will guard it no more forever. One by one they have dropped away as you have journeyed on; and yet your journey does not seem a long one. Life at the longest is but a bubble that bursts so soon as it is rounded. Nelly--your sweet sister, to whom your heart clung so fondly in the young days, and to whom it has clung ever since in the strongest bonds of companionship--is gone--with the rest!