This cannot always go on.  To what is it all tending?  I am not thinking now of an outlook so grave, that this is not the place to discuss it.  But I am thinking how everything is going on.  In this world there is no standing still.  And everything that belongs entirely to this world, its interests and occupations, is going on towards a conclusion.  It will all come to an end.  It cannot go on forever.  I cannot always be writing sermons as I do now, and going on in this regular course of life.  I cannot always be writing essays.  The day will come when I shall have no more to say, or when the readers of the Magazine will no longer have patience to listen to me in that kind fashion in which they have listened so long.  I foresee it plainly, this evening,—­even while writing my first essay for the “Atlantic Monthly,”—­the time when the reader shall open the familiar cover, and glance at the table of contents, and exclaim indignantly, “Here is that tiresome person again:  why will he not cease to weary us?” I write in sober sadness, my friend:  I do not intend any jest.  If you do not know that what I have written is certainly true, you have not lived very long.  You have not learned the sorrowful lesson, that all worldly occupations and interests are wearing to their close.  You cannot keep up the old thing, however much you may wish to do so.  You know how vain anniversaries for the most part are.  You meet with certain old friends, to try to revive the old days; but the spirit of the old time will not come over you.  It is not a spirit that can be raised at will.  It cannot go on forever, that walking down to church on Sundays, and ascending those pulpit-steps; it will change to feeling, though I humbly trust it may be long before it shall change in fact.  Don’t you all sometimes feel something like that?  Don’t you sometimes look about you and say to yourself, That furniture will wear out:  those window-curtains are getting sadly faded; they will not last a lifetime?  Those carpets must be replaced some day; and the old patterns which looked at you with a kindly, familiar expression, through these long years, must be among the old familiar faces that are gone.  These are little things, indeed, but they are among the vague recollections that bewilder our memory; they are among the things which come up in the strange, confused remembrance of the dying man in the last days of life.  There is an old fir-tree, a twisted, strange-looking fir-tree, which will be among my last recollections, I know, as it was among my first.  It was always before my eyes, when I was three, four, five years old:  I see the pyramidal top, rising over a mass of shrubbery; I see it always against a sunset-sky; always in the subdued twilight in which we seem to see things in distant years.  These old friends will die, you think; who will take their place?  You will be an old gentleman, a frail old gentleman, wondered at by younger men, and telling them long stones about the days when Lincoln was President, like those