What can have become of the old world I remember long long ago--almost twenty years ago? It is a weary look backward, and the distance hides it. This is not the world I was born in. I remember when the old men used to show me the ways they walked in, scores of years before, and the very corners and the footpaths through the fields. Here they met an old friend--there they took shelter from a storm. On this lake they skated all day--from that hill they saw the ships returning with victory from foreign war. Men walked quietly together then in silence or friendly talk, and did not jostle each other from the way; they went to bed and rose as the sun did; they followed in their fathers’ ways--read the same books, laughed at the same fine old jokes, and believed their posterity would do the same. Old men then wore grey hairs, and saw their children’s children, and were venerable. But they are all gone; and could they look out of their graves (if indeed their very graves be spared), they would not know the old world they used to live in. It is all changed now with us old fellows of five-and-twenty. We are left doting among the ruins of our youth. There is nothing left to us of our early days. The old crooked grassy byeways where we went to gather blackberries and idle away a summer day, have been gone over by the surveyor’s chain, and some straight cut, with prim, bare fences, has run it down. The little stream has been piped over, and, where it “babbled o’ green fields,” is a noisy, muddy thoroughfare. Over the green glen where the hazels nourished their brown clusters, strides a cursed viaduct; the execrable railway has frighted the linnets from the boughs, and a bird’s nest shall never more be found. In the lonely bay where we used to gather shells, thinking ourselves in fairy land, and wondering what lay beyond the dim horizon, the steamboat roars and splashes. Riot and swearing and slang and vice of cities have usurped the quiet haunts of country calm and charity. It is for a coming age all these things are preparing: to us is allotted only the vexation and bewilderment. I have no associations to link me to these horrors, and I prefer the old repose to all the luxuries they bring. What is it to me that I can go to East or West in so many days sooner, or even if the sun that sets on me to-night should rise for me to-morrow by the Ganges? Here is my “fortunate isle;” this is my home where my heart is. I have no business with Egypt or the Nile. I wish to sit undisturbed by my own fireside, to walk under the old trees, to look on my own fields, to be warmed by my own sun. But they will dig a canal through my silent walks, and the infernal city will pour through these banks its restless impurity, and make them echo with the laughter of brutal debauchery.