There is an imperceptible but powerfully connecting link in our early associations and school-boy friendships, which is very difficult to describe, but exceedingly grateful to reflect on; particularly when the retrospective affords a view of early attachments ripened into perfection with maturity, and cementing firmly with increasing years. Youth is the period of frankness and of zeal, when the young heart, buoyant with hope and cheering prospects, fills with joy, and expands in all the brightness of fancy's variety. The ambition, lures, and conflicting interests of the world, have as yet made no inroad upon the mind; the bosom is a stranger to misery, the tongue to deceit, the eye glows with all the luxuriance of pleasure, and the whole countenance presents an animated picture of health and intelligence illumined with delight. The playfulness or incaution of youth may demand correction, or produce momentary pain; but the tears of ~23~~ infancy fall like the summer dew upon the verdant slope, which the first gleam of the returning sun kisses away, and leaves the face of nature tinged with a blush of exquisite brilliancy, but with no trace of the sparkling moisture which lately veiled its beauty. This is the glittering period of life, when the gay perspective of the future seems clothed in every attractive hue, and the objects of this world assume a grace divine: then it is that happiness, borne on the wings of innocence and light-hearted mirth, attends our every step, and seems to wait obedient to our will. What a painful reverse may not the retrospective view afford! how unlike is the finished picture to the inspiring sketch. The one breathing the soft air of nature, and sparkling in brilliant tints of variegated hues, serene, clear, and transparent, like the magic pencilling of the heavenly Claude, shedding ambrosial sweets around. The reverse indistinct, and overpowered with gloomy shadows, a mixture of the terrific and the marvellous, like the stormy and convulsive scenes of the mighty genius of Salvator Rosa, with here and there a flash of wildest eccentricity, that only serves to render more visible the murky deformity of the whole.