changing good wishes and presents to-day. I
alone have nothing to give or to receive. Poor Solitary! I do not even
know one chosen being for whom I might offer a prayer.

Then let my wishes for a happy New Year go and seek out all my unknown
friends--lost in the multitude which murmurs like the ocean at my feet!

To you first, hermits in cities, for whom death and poverty have
created a solitude in the midst of the crowd! unhappy laborers, who are
condemned to toil in melancholy, and eat your daily bread in silence
and desertion, and whom God has withdrawn from the intoxicating pangs of
love and friendship!

To you, fond dreamers, who pass through life with your eyes turned
toward some polar star, while you tread with indifference over the rich
harvests of reality!

To you, honest fathers, who lengthen out the evening to maintain your
families! to you, poor widows, weeping and working by a cradle! to you,
young men, resolutely set to open for yourselves a path in life, large
enough to lead through it the wife of your choice! to you, all brave
soldiers of work and of self-sacrifice!

To you, lastly, whatever your title and your name, who love good, who
pity the suffering; who walk through the world like the symbolical
Virgin of Byzantium, with both arms open to the human race!

Here I am suddenly interrupted by loud and increasing chirpings. I look
about me: my window is surrounded with sparrows picking up the crumbs of
bread which in my brown study I had just scattered on the roof. At this
sight a flash of light broke upon my saddened heart. I deceived myself
just now, when I complained that I had nothing to give: thanks to me,
the sparrows of this part of the town will have their New-Year's gifts!

Twelve o'clock.--A knock at my door; a poor girl comes in, and greets
me by name. At first I do not recollect her; but she looks at me, and
smiles. Ah! it is Paulette! But it is almost a year since I have seen
her, and Paulette is no longer the same: the other day she was a child,
now she is almost a young woman.

Paulette is thin, pale, and miserably clad; but she has always the same
open and straightforward look--the same mouth, smiling at every word,
as if to court your sympathy--the same voice, somewhat timid, yet
expressing fondness. Paulette is not pretty--she is even thought plain;
as for me, I think her charming. Perhaps that is not on her account, but
on my own. Paulette appears to me as one of my happiest r