fferent living, and
peopled, and haunted world. One life is a thousand lives, and each
individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand
characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be
misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting
and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the
same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God.

Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all
the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since
the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded,
as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the
impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable
being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember
it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering
in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness
all their own--a yellowness nowhere else so vivid--"the bright
consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the
lowly grass--lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the
stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue
fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in
hand with our golden-haired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on
which she died--the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now
darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into
the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out
of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter
never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before
our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! or at the
dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the
midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side,
and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope
to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated
away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like
a reminiscence of some other state of existence.

Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now
call transitory, but which our BOYHOOD felt as if they would be
endless--as if they would endure for ever--arose upon us the glorious
dawning of anoth