memory-"I came to the place of my birth, and I said, the friends of my youth where are they?'—and an echo answered Where are they?"-I recollected having admired this as beautiful, when I first read it-alas! no one knows half its force who has not had occasion to repeat it as I did.

walls, just before our first

When I was shewn to my bed-room, a new scene of painful recollection presented itself. My sister had had the same room prepared for me, which I had always slept in when I was a boy; to which my brother and I had been removed, when our going to school made us considered too old for the nursery. The room now contained only one bed, but every thing else was strikingly the same as when I left it. The prints with which my mother had decorated the return from school-the shelves which had held our little library-even one or two of the mouldering schoolbooks themselves-all combined to call into the most vivid and painful contrast my present and my former self. On the wainscot of dark oak, I found in a wellremembered corner, the misshapen initials of my name, which I had cut with great labour, and had looked on as a work of infinite skill. On each side the chimney hung the portraits of my brother and myself, painted with the round cheeks, open neck, and flowing hair of ten years old. Now one was in the grave-and the other, at that moment, almost wished to be there also. As I gazed on the rosy careless countenance which had once been my likeness, I scarcely could think that it presented the same being. I felt as the dead might be supposed to feel, if they could behold their earthly formso totally did a gulf seem placed between my present nature and that of the blooming boy on whom I looked.

It was, as I have said, the month of July, and the full

moon gave perfect light to the scene which lay beneath the window. I threw it open, and looked out on that well-known, long-loved spot. It was in itself one of great actual beauty-and I dearly loved, and had long regretted it, which made me now think it doubly so. The tall towering oak, which so often had been the goal of our race, and given its shadow to our gambols, was outlined on the bright moon-lighted sky behind, in all the majesty of age, and the luxuriant leafiness of summer. Farther on, the moon threw a line of glittering light on the noble sheet of water which had been to me the means of so much early enjoyment. There, I used to sit for hours fishing on its bank—and there, as my advancing years had caused me to take pleasure in the athletic exercises of youth, I had delighted

In the distance I could see among the trees the blue slate of the cottage where the gamekeeper lived, who had been so great an ally of mine, and whose dwelling had been so favourite a haunt. He also was dead-but he had survived most of his contemporaries, and in his last illness, not long before the time of which I write, he had expressed, my sister told me, deep regret at not living to see Master George come home again. This, and numberless other circumstances connected with my boyish pursuits, rose in my heart as I gazed on the scene which had witnessed them; and, as I closed the window, I felt that there was one more drop of gall added to the cup of bitterness which my return home had proved.

Alas! said I to myself, and is this the hour of my return home-of my meeting with my friends?-I find my mother and my brother dead-my father in a state which

makes it to be wished that he were dead also-and my sister with a chilled heart and a withered frame, which make my soul sink with the contrast between what she was once, and what she is now. All those whose images are indelibly connected in my mind with the abode of my youth are swept away-nothing but the spot itself is left. It is as a skeleton to the human body-the framework is still the same, but all which gave to it life and beauty is withered and vanished. This, I exclaimed with bitterness-this is the happiness of revisiting the scenes of childhood-these are the joys of meeting!

SPIRITS OF BOOKS.

IF it be true, as some have supposed, that the spirits of the departed still inhabit in a ghostly shape their old planet, and take an interest in the objects which formed their cares upon earth, authors must have as troublesome a life of it on the other side of the grave, as they have had on this. We have no doubt a kind of indefinite belief in the supposition; the sacred respect so universally paid to the memory of the dead, must spring from a deep assurance that they are not insensible to the regards of the living. But to the shame of the polite and the learned, who contemn what they are unable to analyze, it is the vulgar almost alone who perceive, and blindly obey, those innate feelings of our nature. With the common people, tombs are temples, and cursed are the hands that would violate the sanctuary, which to them seems to contain all that is left of life" for the spirits of vulgar imaginations," says some author, "are after all

mere bodies." This instinct towards the departed is honoured more in words than in real feeling, by the intellectual, who treat it much in the same manner that they treat all superstitions, and instead of refining them to their own perceptions, outwardly reverence what they internally despise.

Our poets do not assign fit domiciles for their great predecessors, nor do they seem to affix very lofty associations to their hallowed names. The tenderness called forth by the sight of the tomb, or the ashes of genius, is certainly neither poetical nor sublime. Were one endowed with the faculty of perceiving spiritual beings, the very last place one would expect to see the poetic shade, would be to find it seated on its own coffin. It is on the Alps-on the ocean-in the blue vault of heaven-that the eye thus liberated should seek for the spirit of Dante or of Homer; it would be indignant to find them loitering at Florence or at Ephesus. We may suppose patriotism still to exist in departed souls, and may imagine the country of their birth or choice to be their shrine of after-habitation; we may even suppose a city or a mansion endeared to them, and consequently assume it to be their spiritual residence; but a grave, a hole, where merely their bones lie rotting-it is an insult to their memory to suppose that they bestow a particle of interest or consideration on the earthly garments they have thrown off.

Enthusiasm, like charity, should commence at home. The more common the objects that excite this generous glow, the purer and the nobler it is. What "lilylivered" fellow is there that would not be in heroics at Salamis or Thermopylæ? or what fourth-form boy would not be restless the first night he slept in immortal Rome? There is no merit in such necessary ecstatics,

nor any genuine feeling to be excited by thus playing hide and go seek with great sensations. The mighty prospect of Roman grandeur or of Grecian heroism is lost in the little tickling reflection, me voici-here I am. Instead of the imagination wandering amid glorious events and ages past, it is kept subordinate to egotism, and compelled to consider itself as the only true centre of interest, even though it should be at the moment contemplating the palace of the Cæsars. With due deference to modern pilgrims, their taste does not seem to be the best. They pay but a sorry compliment, when they weep over the ashes and lament the deaths of the immortal; nor ought we to be much obliged to those who call us from enjoying and conversing with the spirit of genius, that we may regard its misfortunes or its bones. Such things should be kept behind the scenes, poets should have no graves but in the breasts or the libraries of mankind..

Notwithstanding all the eulogiums that have been indited on the subject, that discovery of printing was a sad thing for books;-it destroyed the veneration and prestige that enveloped a volume. Before that, there was not only the value, in an Adam Smith point of view, viz., the time and trouble of transcribing and illumining, but the rarity of such a treasure, which placed it in its convent domicile by the side of saintly relics. What would this age of private presses and presentation-copies say to wars quashed by the ceding of a single volume-to testaments and entails concerning a book? What would it think of the crusades of the Italian literati in the age of the Medici among those wicked Mahomedans in search of a manuscript? Bibliomaniacs may write and may bid for black letter as they please they can never equal the renown and