EVERY man hath two birth-days; two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that whi an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observahis of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who refleothing at all about the matter, nor uand any thing in it beyond cake and e. But the birth of a New Year is of an ioo wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indiffere is that from which all date their time, and t upon what is left. It is the nativity of our on Adam.
Of all sounds of all bell -- (bells, the musiighest b upon heaven) -- most solemn and toug is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a tration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed lected in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a porary, when he exclaimed
I saw the skirts of the departing Year.
It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to he scious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my panions. affected rather to ma an exhilaration at the birth of the ing year, than aender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who -
Wele the ing, speed the parting guest.
I am naturally, beforehand, shy of ies: new books, new faces, new years, -- from some mental twist which makes it difficult. io face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I pluone visions and clusions. I enter pell-mell with past disappois. I am armour-proof against old discements. I five, or overe in fancy, old adversaries. I play ain for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarow have any of those untoward acts as of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the is of some well-trived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my golde years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W--n , than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, ahout the idea of that specious ue.
In a degree beh manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love?
If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective -- and mine is painfully so -- have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious * * * addicted to * * * * : averse from sel, her taking it, nor it: -- * * * besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not: I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou st be willing to lay at his door -- -- -- but for the child Elia -- that "other me," there, in the back-ground -- I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master -- with as littl