Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their marriage, of the birth of their first-born, and they hold—­although they spread no feast, and ask no friends to assist—­many another anniversary besides.  On many a day in every year does a man remember what took place on that self-same day in some former year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, as the case may be.  Could I ever hope to write a decent Essay, I should like to write one “On the Revisiting of Places.”  It is strange how important the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to double back on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, to meet himself face to face, as it were!  I go to the great city in which my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim.  The only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected with myself.  I don’t think this passion of reminiscence is debased by the slightest taint of vanity.  The lamp-post, under the light of which in the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplate with the most curious interest.  I stare on the windows of the houses in which I once lived, with a feeling which I should find difficult to express in words.  I think of the life I led there, of the good and the bad news that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who was born; and were it at all possible, I should like to knock at the once familiar door, and look at the old walls—­which could speak to me so strangely—­once again.  To revisit that city is like walking away back into my yesterdays.  I startle myself with myself at the corners of streets, I confront forgotten bits of myself at the entrance to houses.  In windows which to another man would seem blank and meaningless, I find personal poems too deep to be ever turned into rhymes—­more pathetic, mayhap, than I have ever found on printed page.  The spot of ground on which a man has stood is for ever interesting to him.  Every experience is an anchor holding him the more firmly to existence.  It is for this reason that we hold our sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries of joy and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back upon ourselves, living over again the memorable experience.  The full yellow moon of next September will gather into itself the light of the full yellow moons of Septembers long ago.  In this Christmas night all the other Christmas nights of my life live.  How warm, breathing, full of myself is the year 1862, now almost gone!  How bare, cheerless, unknown, the year 1863, about to come in!  It stretches before me in imagination like some great, gaunt untenanted ruin of a Colosseum, in which no footstep falls, no voice is heard; and by this night year its naked chambers and windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will be clothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with covering ivies.  Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition.  The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.