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, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay; And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what time takes away, Than what he leaves behind. Well, time cures every wound, and though the scar may remain and occasionally ache, yet the earliest agony of its recent infliction is felt no more.”--So saying, he shook Lovel cordially by the hand, wished him good-night, and took his leave. Step after step Lovel could trace his host’s retreat along the various passages, and each door which he closed behind him fell with a sound more distant and dead. The guest, thus separated from the living world, took up the candle and surveyed the apartment.