CHAPTER VII.

THE ELDER AT HIS BIRTHPLACE.

"SPIRIT-STIRRING THOMAS CARLYLE has fancifully balanced our Indian Empire against our WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.-Of course his loyal heart heaved the Empire aboon the beam. Descending from Men to Words, which could we Englanders best dispense with our Colonies, or the word HOME?"—E.

In the month of September in every year invariably, the Old Man, winsome Lady! with whom thou hast thus far borne, was wont to abandon Ivy Lodge, and, during the presidency-in-chief of the harvest-moon, to sojourn at the place of his birth: occasionally also in merry May his salutary face was turned thitherwards. Attendant on "these accustomed annual rounds," there were "partings" at the Lodge, not by any means "sudden," or of that romantic fervency which a bold poetic figure describes as pressing the heart's life out, but full enough of pathos to dim the

Elder's eye. E. accounted for such emotions, and justified what sterner systems of flesh and blood might designate as weakness or effeminacy, by the argument that these autumnal visitations were made in serious rather than in holiday meaning; that Time, with seemingly-increasing celerity, was conducting him into close proximity with that critical withdrawing-gate by which all Earth's human company retire, after visits varying in duration, but by authoritative premonition announced and by accumulating evidence approved to terminate about the threescore-and-tenth year, elude as we may the fatal beck of humankind's gaunt Scene-shifter; and that when, as the ancient of years, he returned to the spot from whence was dated his beginning of days, he moved, though not with heavy heart, " as though his steps were tow'rds a tomb," for when his little life should be rounded by its second sleep, it was there, in his own familiar sod, that he desired to be laid down.

Of the Elder's feathered dependents two especial favorites, the Queen Dowager and Sir Fred, were chosen to accompany him into country quarters, a measure adopted not so much from E.'s passion for music as to avert their self-inflicted martyrdom in the cause of abstinency—a suicidal zeal in which, or

desperate chagrin at his absence, had once nearly reduced them to barebones during an autumnal recess of the rightful Purveyor. The impassive Benjamin was indispensable as compagnon de voyage, so that he also migrated; and while the rural sojourn lasted, the guardianship of the Lodge was delegated to a trusty old official who first entered the service in the year 10 (eighteen prior centuries understood); and when the pro tem. governor had lent respectful audience to E.'s last iteration of injunctions, de totis rebus et quibusdam aliis, he sustained in his stewardship a burden of responsibility, compared with which Lord Ashburton's was a bagatelle, when he undertook the business of the boundary-question and the ticklish task of pacifying noisy brother Jonathan.

A green valley bosoming an old grey temple down in the fertile south of Hants, was the scene whereon E.'s eyes first opened to a world very "unintelligible" to infants and philosophers. A sentiment planted by invisible agency, and fostered by unseen dew that gathers at the dawn of sentiency, stimulates in afterlife, even in the sordid, a complacent regard for the spot of his first unconscious début in the character of Mewler and Puker in a nurse's arms;-relaxing to the risible muscles of the most austere is the reflection,

that he surmounts the actual hearth where his infantine riotings were rocked into repose, which Colic, not Care, invaded then; or that he paces, with the step of manly vigor, the sphere of his early enterprises in the critical art of self-dependent locomotion.— Firmly, indeed, is the ligature which binds man to his birthplace woven into the curious fabric of the heart's affections; strongly twined must it be there with the "silver cord," to resist unbrokenly all subsequent idolatries-to abide ineradicable by Time, and maintain its prominent relief through all his motley augmentation of devices. Faith is avowedly fantastical in many of its propositions; but certainly that article cannot be deemed a fantasy which contends, that mankind are marked by local as well as by ancestral lineaments;-that from the place in which "careless childhood strayed," as from a metaphysical matrix, we deduce to our moral constitution a conformity or semi-conformity to its distinctive features. It is the intellectual character receiving its idiosyncrasy in secret, as did the physical frame its members; -the imperceptible fashioning of its faculties " yet being imperfect" or " when as yet there was none of them." The tokens of this local lineality may remain undeveloped for years: If in early life we start into

scenic extremes-if the embryo-man be hurried, while yet a child, from the hamlet to a city, and thrust into the hot throng, then its long-continued pressure is of resistless power: nor only of power upon the character in that peculiarly-elastic period, but also on caution-and-cavil-bound maturity the influence successfully works, subjugating by sheer incessancy of operation; for we are wisely made of plastic clay, of which Circumstance (always under omniscient control) is the potter; and in the constantlyrevolving crucible of Custom the sternest stuff is shapen into a fitness for its uses. But the hour arrives to many, (and especially about the period of the first of two momentous crises, when the frivolities of youth are found distasteful and the earnest Man is consolidating,) that in half-active, half-involuntary retrospection, the thinking being, in his review of bygone times and scenes, is reminded by Memory— that mental resurrectionist-of many sensations quickened in a season which, if it were careless, was sometimes visited by Thought in its vagrancy; and as he grows increasingly intent upon the hours when an holiday made a light heart, and a light heart was happiness, a host of long-dormant emotions reviveemotions too dreamy for clear, comprehensible recog