Then how perfectly glorious was the anticipation of a holiday--a long summer day of liberty and ease! In anticipation it was a thing boundless and endless, a foretaste of Elysium. It extended from the _prima luce_, from the earliest dawn of radiance that streaked the "severing clouds in yonder east," through the sun's matin, meridian, postmeridian, and vesper circuit; from the disappearance of Lucifer in the re-illumined skies, to his evening entree in the character of Hesperus. Complain not of the brevity of life; 'tis _men_ that are idle; a thousand things could be contrived and accomplished in that space, and a thousand schemes were devised by us, when _boys_, to prevent any portion of it passing over without improvement. We pursued the fleet angel of time through all his movements till he blessed us. With these and similar thoughts in my mind, I strayed down to the banks of the river, and came upon the very spot, which, in those long-vanished years, had been a favourite scene of our boyish sports. The impression was overpowering; and as I gazed silently around me, my mind was subdued to that tone of feeling which Ossian so finely designates "the joy of grief." The trees were the same, but older, like myself; seemingly unscathed by the strife of years--and herein was a difference. Some of the very bushes I recognised as our old lurking-places at "hunt the hare;" and, on the old fantastic beech-tree, I discovered the very bough from which we were accustomed to suspend our swings. What alterations--what sad havoc had time, circumstances, the hand of fortune, and the stroke of death, made among us since then! How were the thoughts of the heart, the hopes, the pursuits, the feelings changed; and, in almost every instance, it is to be feared, for the worse! As I gazed around me, and paused, I could not help reciting aloud to myself the lines of Charles Lamb, so touching in their simple beauty. "I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me, all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."