such a one as S. T. C.-he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations tripling their value. I have had experience. Many of these precious MSS. of his—(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in no very clerkly hand-legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands.-I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.

NEW-YEAR'S-EVE.

EVERY man hath two birthdays; two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sound of all bells-bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven-most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration

of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected, in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary when he exclaimed

"I saw the skirts of the departing year."

It is no more than what, in sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predeBut I am none of those who

cessor.

"Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties: new books, new faces, new years-from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice W-n, than that so passion

ate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when I say that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective-and mine is painfully so-can have a less respect for his present identity than I have for the man Flia. I know him to be light and vain and humorsome; a notorious ; addicted to -; averse from counsel, neither taking it nor offering it; besides; a stammering buffoon-what you will, lay it on and spare not: I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou canst be willing to lay at his door; but for the child Elia, that "other me" there in the background, I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master, with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty as if it had been a child of some other house and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five and rougher mendicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick-pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least color of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling), it was-how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful!

From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself-and not some dissembling guardian presenting a false identity to give the rule to my unpractised steps and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or, is it owing to another cause: simply that, being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and, having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea as my heir and favorite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom-cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution: and the ringing out of the old year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it, indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now-shall I confess a truth? I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of

my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth, the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived, I and my friends, to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age, or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests, and irony itself— do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if