Equally when I was a little boy did I not resolve one New Year's Day that I would keep the whole Ten Commandments, and was I not caught in the preserve closet the same day and subjected to a degree of corporal punishment which made me break nearly all the rest of them before night? I never saw but one person who succeeded in keeping a New Year's resolution, and he had pined away so rapidly in his physical and grown so abnormally in his moral man, that it was really painful to look at him. He was the nearest approach to an angel on half rations I ever expect to see. A good meal would have made him sick, but I really believe he would have bolted at one gulp the entire nine tons of tracts which some New York individual has kindly forwarded to the Young Men's Christian Association. I cannot but admire the theological cheek of this man. His brass is of no ordinary description. It is sonorous, stately, magnificent. Nine tons of tracts! Twenty thousand one hundred and sixty pounds of appeal to the ungodly! Three hundred and twenty-two thousand five hundred and sixty ounces of the essence of doctrine! About thirty miles of grace! December 28, 1867. _OLE BULL._ My last recollection of Farwell Hall is connected with a tall, graceful, sweet-faced old man, his head lovingly bending over a violin that old Stradivarius made centuries ago, his eyes closed, transfigured in a vision of music, until he seemed to me to wear the face that Beethoven, the Master, might have worn. In his hands the dull wood was again in life. It was part of an organism, and it told the old man of the rustle of leaves in the summer gales; of the songs of birds in the branches; of the brawling waters of the brooks that moistened the roots; of the rude winds that smote the tree on Italian hills; of the star that looked down upon it in delicious Italian nights; of the vernal thrill, the summer glow, the autumnal decay, and the wintry death in life--the great miracle which Nature performs for us each year; and the old man interpreted it in bewitching strains to some who gave themselves up to the spell and were drawn nearer together by the sympathy which music produces, to some who heard the sound and not the soul, and to some who heard neither, in the sound of their own small gabble. And the next day, when a heap of smoking bricks, and charred beams, and twisted iron was all that was left of the beautiful hall, it seemed to me that I had met with an irreparable loss--that some friend had suddenly vanished. January 11, 1868. * * * * * One of the most charmingly chatty things Leigh Hunt ever wrote was his "Earth Upon Heaven," in which he imagined himself following out his earthly occupations in the upper world; dining with all the good fellows of past ages; reading new plays of Shakspeare and new novels of Scott; eating sugar that was not sanded, and drinking milk from celestial cows in the Milky Way.