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.

This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The
smith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is
at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang
from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the
villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces--the latter
a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in
the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of