It is almost impossible for man on this day to be insensible to the "still small voices" that call upon him for a gathering up of his thoughts. In the very midst of the house of mirth, a shadow passes through the heart and summons it to a solemn conference. The skeleton who sits at all feasts, though overlooked at most from long habit, gets power on this day to wave his hand, and points emphatically, with his "slow-moving finger," to the long record whose burthen is "passing away!" The handwriting of Time comes visibly out upon the wall; and the spirit pauses to read its lessons, and take an account of the wrecks which it registers and the changes which it announces. Properly speaking, every day is the commencement of a new year, and the termination of an old one; but it is only, as we have said at the beginning of this book, by these emphatic markings that man is attracted to a consideration of a fact, whose daily recurrence at once makes its weighty importance and causes it to be forgotten, as if it were of none! But on this particular day, no man fails to remember that-- "Again the silent wheels of time Their annual round have driven;" and how solemn are the reflections which suggest themselves to him who casts his eye over the space of a year, in a spirit which can look beyond his own personal share in its doings, and embrace the wide human interests that such a retrospect includes! "What a mighty sum of events," says that excellent writer, William Howitt, "has been consummated; what a tide of passions and affections has flowed; what lives and deaths have alternately arrived; what destinies have been fixed forever! . . . Once more our planet has completed one of those journeys in the heavens which perfect all the fruitful changes of its peopled surface, and mete out the few stages of our existence; and every day, every hour of that progress has in all her wide lands, in all her million hearts, left traces that eternity shall behold." Oh! blessed they and rich, beyond all other blessedness and all other wealth which "Time's effacing fingers" may have left them, who, on the last night of the year, can turn from reviews like these to sleep upon the pillow of a good conscience, though that pillow should be moistened, aye, steeped in their tears!