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EVERY man hath two birth-days; 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 whi an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observahis of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who refleothing at all about the matter, nor uand any thing in it beyond cake and e. But the birth of a New Year is of an ioo wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indiffere is that from which all date their time, and t upon what is left. It is the nativity of our on Adam.Of all sounds of all bell -- (bells, the musiighest b upon heaven) -- most solemn and toug is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a tration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed lected in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a porary, 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 he scious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my panions. affected rather to ma an exhilaration at the birth of the ing year, than aender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who -
Wele the ing, speed the parting guest.
I am naturally, beforehand, shy of ies: new books, new faces, new years, -- from some mental twist which makes it difficult. io face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I pluone visions and clusions. I enter pell-mell with past disappois. I am armour-proof against old discements. I five, or overe in fancy, old adversaries. I play ain for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for whi99ｌib.ch I once paid so dear. I would scarow have any of those untoward acts as of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the is of some well-trived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my golde years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W--n , than that so passionate 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, ahout the idea of that specious ue.
In a degree beh 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 -- have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious * * * addicted to * * * * : averse from sel, her taking it, nor it: -- * * * besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not: I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou st be willing to lay at his door -- -- -- but for the child Elia -- that "other me," there, in the back-ground -- I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master -- with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid geling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medits. I lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christs, 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 colour of falsehood. -- God help thee, Elia, how art thou ged! Thou art sophisticated. -- I know how ho, how ceous (for a weakling) it was -- hious, 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 retrospeay be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learo project myself enough out of myself: and having no offspring of my own to daily with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader -- (a busy man, perce), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-ceited only, I retire, imperable to ridicule, uhe 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 t a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce ceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reing that ed 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 propriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I fess a truth ? -- I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to t the probabilities of my duration, and te at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more t upon their periods, and would fain lay my iual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not tent to pass away "like a weavers 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: a at the iable course of destiny. I am in love with this greeh; the face of town and try; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am tent 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, i９9lｉｂ? or in lodging, puzzles and disposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A ate of being staggers me.
Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juieats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and dle-light, and fireside versations, and i vanities, as, and irony itself -- these things go out with life?
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 e to me, if it e at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?
Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which poio them here, -- the reisable face -- the "sweet assurance of a look" -- ?
In wihis intolerable disination to dying -- to give it its mildest name -- does more especially haunt a me. In a genial August nooh a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, -- that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the ticles : -- I am none of her minions -- I hold with the Persian.
Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore. -- I have heard some profess an indiffereo life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port e; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death -- -- -- but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instao be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and founding Positive!
Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfa hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors ih," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows ? -- or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear? " -- why, to e, must Alice W--n be a goblin? More than all, I ceive disgust at those imperti9９liｂ? and misbeing familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturih his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly he." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imagi. In the mean-time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years Days are past. I survive, a jolly didate for 1821. Another cup of wine -- and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully ted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with ged notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attuo its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. -
THE NEW YEAR.
Hark, the cock crows, and yht star
Tells us, the day himselfs not far;
And see where, breaking from the night,
He gilds the western hills with light.
With him old Janus doth appear,
Peeping into the future year,
With such a look as seems to say,
The prospect is not good that way.
Thus do we rise ill sights to see,
And `gainst ourselves to prophesy;
When the prophetic fear of things
A more tormenting mischief brings,
More full of soul-tormenting gall,
Than direst mischiefs befall.
But stay ! but stay! methinks my sight,
Better informd by clearer light
Diss sereneness in that brow,
That all tracted seemd but now.
His reversd face may show distaste,
And frown upon the ills are past;
But that which this way looks is clear,
And smiles upon the New-born Year.
He looks too from a place so high,
The Year lies open to his eye;
And all the moments open are
To the exact discoverer.
Yet more and more he smiles upon
The happy revolution.
Why should we then suspect or fear
The influences of a year,
So smiles upon us the first morn,
And speaks us good so soon as born?
Plague ont! the last was ill enough,
This ot but make better proof;
Or, at the worst, as we brushd through
The last, why so we may this too;
And then the in reason shoud
Be superexcellently good:
For the worst ills (we daily see)
Have no more perpetuity,
Than the best fortuhat do fall;
Which als us wherewithal
Loheir being to support,
Than those do of the other sort:
And who has one good year in three,
A repi destiny, [p 32]
Appears ungrateful in the case,
As not the good he has.
The us wele the New Guest
With lusty brimmers of the best;
Mirth always should Good Fortu,
And renders een Disaster sweet:
And though the Priurn her back,
Let us but line ourselves with sack,
We better shall by far hold out,
Till the Year she face about.
How say you, reader -- do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the co? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? --passed like a cloud -- absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry -- washed away by a wave of genuine Heli, your only Spa for these hypodries -- And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!
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