Poor Will Thackeray, when a stripling, was fit to kneel in the street
before his mistress, that bright luminary who shone to his boyish eyes
like a star of the first magnitude! Alas, he discovered her to be one of
the sixteenth, and by the time he had ceased to care for polished boots
and stiff, broad collars, she had dwindled down to an ordinary piece of
humanity!

He found his boon companions, like himself, liable to mistake an ant for
a whale and think the King of England next in royalty to a god!

What a fool he made of himself in the eyes of those who were wiser than
he, when he swore the crown of England was made of unalloyed gold! The
water he drank was filled with animalculae, yet he swore it was pure as
the gods' nectar. The best and freshest air he breathed contained poison,
yet his boyish wisdom knew better than that.

Poor Thackeray! wiser men than he knew that youthful imagination was a
cheat; that the mistress of his heart was not a goddess; and wiser beings
than they all knew--angelic beings, living in the golden streets of
Paradise, knew--that the conception of what the spirit after death would
be able to do was as far from the truth as were his boyish dreams of the
mistress of his heart!

Poor Thackeray! he has attained that superior wisdom now! He walks,
himself a ghost, among the ghosts of the past; and these "airy nothings"
nod and smile, and shake hands, and say:

"Yes, we are ourselves."

He thrusts his hands into his trowsers pockets, and remembers the time
when he thought it would be indecent to go naked in the New Jerusalem!
Trowsers, forsooth! Yes, here they are, pockets and all; and he dives his
hands in deeper, jingling something which strongly resembles cash; and
struts about and hobnobs with Addison, Spencer, Sterne, old Dean Swift,
and he asks himself, "are these the great men of my fancy?" On reflection
he finds he had expected to meet these luminaries shining like actual
stars in the firmament, attended by some undefined splendor.

Poor Will Thackeray! he finds the same dross in the gold, the same
animalculae in the water, the same poison in the air, the same fact that
men are not gods in that much-vaunted place called heaven, as on the
much-abused earth. But he wipes his spectacles, and clears away the mist
of speculation and fancy, which has bedimmed his eyes, and looks about
him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when he walked through
Vanity Fair and saw how M