It is almost impossible for man on this day to be insensible to the "still small voices" that call upon him for a gathering up of his thoughts. In the very midst of the house of mirth, a shadow passes through the heart and summons it to a solemn conference. The skeleton who sits at all feasts, though overlooked at most from long habit, gets power on this day to wave his hand, and points emphatically, with his "slow-moving finger," to the long record whose burthen is "passing away!" The handwriting of Time comes visibly out upon the wall; and the spirit pauses to read its lessons, and take an account of the wrecks which it registers and the changes which it announces. Properly speaking, every day is the commencement of a new year, and the termination of an old one; but it is only, as we have said at the beginning of this book, by these emphatic markings that man is attracted to a consideration of a fact, whose daily recurrence at once makes its weighty importance and causes it to be forgotten, as if it were of none!
But on this particular day, no man fails to remember that—
"Again the silent wheels of time
Their annual round have driven;"
and how solemn are the reflections which suggest themselves to him who casts his eye over the space of a year, in a spirit which can look beyond his own personal share in its doings, and embrace the wide human interests that such a retrospect includes! "What a mighty sum of events," says that excellent writer, William Howitt, "has been consummated; what a tide of passions and affections has flowed; what lives and deaths have alternately arrived; what destinies have been fixed forever! . . . Once more our planet has completed one of those journeys in the heavens which perfect all the fruitful changes of its peopled surface, and mete out the few stages of our existence; and every day, every hour of that progress has in all her wide lands, in all her million hearts, left traces that eternity shall behold." Oh! blessed they and rich, beyond all other blessedness and all other wealth which "Time's effacing fingers" may have left them, who, on the last night of the year, can turn from reviews like these to sleep upon the pillow of a good conscience, though that pillow should be moistened, aye, steeped in their tears!
No doubt it is in the name of his own private affections that man is first summoned to that review, which the wise will end by thus extending; and the first reckoning which each will naturally take is that of the treasures which may have been lost or gained to himself in the year which is about to close. Through many, many a heart, that summons rings in the low, sweet, mournful voice of some beloved one, whom in that bereaving space we have laid in the "narrow house;" and then it will happen (for man is covetous of his griefs, when his attention is once called to them) that the ghost which took him out into the churchyard to visit its own tomb, will end by carrying him round its dreary precincts and showing him all the graves that he has planted from his childhood. There will be hours on a day like this to many, and in some year or another to most, when the cheerful hopes which are also of the natural spirit of the season would contend in vain with the memories which it conjures up, but for that furthest and brightest hope which lies beyond the rest, and which is at this moment typified and shadowed forth by the returning sun and the renewing year.
We cannot refrain from pausing here, to quote for our readers a few exquisite and affecting lines written in the seventeenth century by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, to one such beloved remembrancer, and in the cheering spirit of that same precious hope. We fancy they are very little known.
"Sleep on, my love! in thy cold bed,
Never to be disquieted!
My last 'good night!'—thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake;
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves,—and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
Stay for me there!—I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow vale:—
And think not much of my delay,
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And every houre a step tow'rds thee:—
At night, when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres' sail,
Than when sleep breathed his drowsy gale!"
There are in the last volume of poems published by Mr. Tennyson, some beautiful verses, in which the natural thoughts that inevitably haunt this season of change are touchingly expressed, as they arise even in the young breast of one for whom "seasons and their change" are immediately about to be no more. We are in a mood which tempts us to extract them.
If you're waking, call me early, call me early, mother dear,
For I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year—
It is the last New-year that I shall ever see,
Then ye may lay me low i' the mould, and think no more of me.
To-night I saw the sun set: he set and left behind
The good old year, the dear old time, and all my peace of mind;
And the New-year's coming up, mother, but I shall never see
The may upon the blackthorn, the leaf upon the tree.
Last May we made a crown of flowers: we had a merry day:
Beneath the hawthorn on the green they made me Queen of May;
And we danced about the maypole, and in the hazel-copse,
Till Charles's wain came out above the tall white chimney-tops.
There's not a flower on all the hills: the frost is on the pane:
I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again:
I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high—
I long to see a flower so before the day I die.
The building rook 'll caw from the windy tall elm-tree,
And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea,
And the swallow 'll come back again with summer o'er the wave,
But I shall lie alone, mother, within the mouldering grave.
Upon the chancel casement, and upon that grave of mine,
In the early, early morning the summer sun 'll shine,
Before the red cock crows from the farm upon the hill,
When you are warm asleep, mother, and all the world is still.
When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light,
Ye 'll never see me more in the long gray fields at night;
When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool,
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool.
Ye 'll bury me, my mother, just beneath the hawthorn shade,
And ye 'll come sometimes and see me where I am lowly laid,
I shall not forget ye, mother, I shall hear ye when ye pass,
With your feet above my head in the long and pleasant grass.
I have been wild and wayward, but ye 'll forgive me now:
Ye 'll kiss me, my own mother, upon my cheek and brow;
Nay,—nay, ye must not weep, nor let your grief be wild,
Ye should not fret for me, mother, ye have another child.
If I can, I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place
Tho' ye 'll not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face;
Tho' I cannot speak a word, I shall hearken what ye say,
And be often—often with ye when ye think I'm far away.
Good night! good night! when I have said good night for evermore,
And ye see me carried out from the threshold of the door,
Don't let Effie come to see me till my grave be growing green;
She'll be a better child to you than ever I have been.
She'll find my garden tools upon the granary floor;
Let her take 'em,—they are hers,—I shall never garden more:
But tell her, when I'm gone, to train the rosebush that I set,
About the parlor window, and the box of mignonette.
Good night, sweet mother! call me when it begins to dawn:
All night I lie awake, but I fall asleep at morn:
But I would see the sun rise upon the glad New year,
So, if you're waking, call me, call me early, mother dear!
And it is wholesome that the mournful reflections which the period suggests should be indulged, but not to the neglect of its more cheerful influences. The New Year's Eve is in all quarters looked upon as a time of rejoicing; and perhaps no night of this merry season is more universally dedicated to festivity. Men are for the most part met in groups to hail the coming year with propitiatory honors; and copious libations are poured to its honor, as if to determine it to look upon us with a benignant aspect. We generally spend our New Year's Eve in some such group; but, we confess, it is not every class of wassailers that will suit us for the occasion. The fact is, after all our resolves to work up our minds to the pitch of gladness, aye, and notwithstanding our success, too, there are other feelings that will intrude in spite of us; and we like to find ourselves in a party where their presence is not looked upon as a marrer of the revels. When fitly associated for such a night, we find the very feelings in question for the most part to harmonize very delightfully with the predominant spirit of the time, producing a sort of mixed sensation which is full of luxury and tenderness. Bye the by, we have no great wish to have for our companions at any time those precisians who insist greatly on the external solemnities. "Ye are sae grave, nae doubt ye're wise," says Burns. But for ourselves, gentlemen, our sympathies lie with those who can be made to understand that the garb of even folly may by possibility be at times worn by those who conceal beneath it more sickness of the heart, as well as more wisdom, than shall ever be dreamt of in your philosophy,—who know, in fact, that that same folly is sometimes the very saddest thing in the world; that the jingle of the cap and bells is too often but a vain device, like that of the ancient Corybantes, to drown the "still small" sounds whose wailing is yet heard over all.