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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1841, by CAREY AND HART, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

ENOX LIBRA

NEW YORK

MOY WEN

C. Sherman & Co. Printers,

Is St. James Street.

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AN ESSAY ON THE THEORY AND THE WRITINGS OF WORDS-

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MEM AORK

WILSON'S MISCELLANIES.

CHRISTMAS DREAMS.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1828.)

How beautiful are all the subdivisions of time diversifying the dream of human life, as it glides away between earth and heaven! And why should moralists mourn over that mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily before our eyes, leaving image upon image fairer and dearer far than even the realities, still visible, and it may be for ever, in the waters of memory sleeping within the heart? Memory never awakes but along with imagination, and therefore it is

"That she can give us back the dead,
Even in the loveliest looks they wore!"

The years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the hours, the minutes, the moments, each is in itself a different 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 dying away, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the same unchanging conscience, that feels and knows that it is from God.

Oh! who can complain of the shortness of human life, that can retravel all the windings and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since the farthest back

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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 for ever-forgotten years of our wonderful being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we 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 along, hand in hand with our golden-haired sister, whom all that looked on loved!-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 sheher coffin-and that velvet pall descended-and descended -slowly, slowly into the horrid clay, and we were borne deathlike, and wishing to die, out of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter never more! And oh! 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 another new life-Youth! with its insupportable sunshine, and its magnificent storms! transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving the name of dream! But while it lasted, long, various, and agonizing, while, unable to sustain "the beauty still more beauteous" of the eyes that first revealed to us the light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to the moon and

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