Of all sounds 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 hear 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 colour; 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 predecessor.  But I am none of those who—­

  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 armour-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 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, 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 Elia.  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 back-ground—­I must take leave