University of Virginia Library

I.
What is Gone.

GONE! Did it ever strike you, my reader, how much
meaning lies in that little monosyllable—gone?
Say it to yourself at nightfall, when the sun has
sunk under the hills, and the crickets chirp—`gone.
Say it to yourself, when the night is far over, and you
wake with some sudden start, from pleasant dreams,—
`gone.' Say it to yourself in some country churchyard,
where your father, or your mother, sleeps under
the blooming violets of spring—`gone.' Say it, in
your sobbing prayer to Heaven, as you cling lovingly,
but oh, how vainly, to the hand of your sweet wife—
`gone!'

Aye, is there not meaning in it? And now, what is
gone:—or rather, what is not gone? Childhood is

gone with all its blushes, and fairness,—with all its
health and wanton,—with all its smiles, like glimpses
of heaven; and all its tears, which were but the suffusion
of joy.

Youth is gone;—bright, hopeful youth, when you
counted the years with jewelled numbers, and hung
lamps of ambition at your path, which lighted the
palace of renown;—when the days were woven into
weeks of blithe labor, and the weeks were rolled into
harvest months of triumph, and the months were
bound into golden sheaves of years—all, gone!

The strength and pride of manhood is gone; your
heart and soul have stamped their deepest dye; the
time of power is past; your manliness has told its
tale; henceforth your career is down;—hitherto,
you have journeyed up. You look back upon a
decade, as you once looked upon a half score of
months; a year has become to your slackened memory,
and to your dull perceptions, like a week of childhood.
Suddenly and swiftly, come past you, great whirls of
gone-by thought, and wrecks of vain labor, eddying
upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping
outlines of life, that lay once before the vision—
rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a
broad mountain-range,—now seem close-packed together,
as with a Titan hand; and you see only

crowded, craggy heights,—like Alpine fastnesses—parted
with glaciers of grief, and leaking abundant tears!

Your friends are gone;—they who counselled and
advised you, and who protected your weakness, will
guard it no more forever. One by one, they have
dropped away as you have journeyed on; and yet your
journey does not seem a long one. Life, at the longest,
is but a bubble that bursts, so soon as it is rounded.

Nelly, your sweet sister, to whom your heart clung
so fondly in the young days, and to whom it has clung
ever since, in the strongest bonds of companionship,—
is gone,—with the rest!

Your thought,—wayward now, and flickering,—runs
over the old days with quick, and fevered step; it
brings back, faintly as it may, the noisy joys, and the
safety, that belonged to the old garret roof; it figures
again the image of that calm-faced father,—long since
sleeping beside your mother; it rests like a shadow,
upon the night when Charlie died; it grasps the old
figures of the school-room, and kindles again (how
strange is memory), the fire that shed its lustre upon
the curtains, and the ceiling, as you lay groaning with
your first hours of sickness.

Your flitting recollection brings back with gushes of
exultation, the figure of that little, blue-eyed hoyden,—
Madge,—as she came with her work, to pass the long
evenings with Nelly; it calls again the shy glances that

you cast upon her, and your naïve ignorance of all the
little counter-play, that might well have passed between
Frank and Nelly. Your mother's form too, clear and
distinct, comes upon the wave of your rocking thought;
her smile touches you now in age, as it never touched
you in boyhood.

The image of that fair Miss Dalton, who led your
fancy into such mad captivity, glides across your vision
like the fragment of a crazy dream—long gone by.
The country-home, where lived the grandfather of
Frank, gleams kindly in the sunlight of your memory;
and still,—poor, blind Fanny,—long since gathered to
that rest, where her closed eyes will open upon visions
of joy,—draws forth a sigh of pity.

Then, comes up that sweetest, and brightest vision
of love, and the doubt and care which ran before it,—
when your hope groped eagerly through your pride,
and worldliness, toward the sainted purity of her,
whom you know to be—all too good;—when you
trembled at the thought of your own vices, and blackness,
in the presence of her, who seemed—virtue's self.
And even now, your old heart bounds with joy, as you
recal the first timid assurance,—that you were blessed
in the possession of her love, and that you might live
in her smiles.

Your thought runs like floating melody, over the calm
joy that followed you through so many years;—to the

prattling children, who were there to bless your path.
How poor, seem now your transports, as you met their
childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ;—how
utterly weak, the actual, when compared
with that glow of affection, which memory lends to the
scene!

Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone,
which knit your heart so strongly to those children,
and to her—the mother;—anxieties which distressed
you,—which you would eagerly have shunned; yet,
whose memory you would not now bargain away, for a
king's ransom! What were the sunlight worth, if
clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what
were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the
chilling winter did not teach us the story of their
warmth?

The days are gone too, in which you may have
lingered under the sweet suns of Italy,—with the
cherished one beside you, and the eager children, learning
new prattle, in the soft language of those Eastern
lands. The evenings are gone, in which you loitered
under the trees, with those dear ones under the light
of a harvest moon, and talked of your blooming hopes,
and of the stirring plans of your manhood. There are
no more ambitious hopes—no more sturdy plans!
Life's work has rounded into the evening that shortens
labor.

And as you loiter in dreams over the wide waste of
what is gone,—a mingled array of griefs and of joys—
of failures, and of triumphs,—you bless God, that there
has been so much of joy, belonging to your shattered
life; and you pray God, with the vain fondness that
belongs to a parent's heart,—that more of joy, and less
of toil, may come near to the cherished ones, who bear
up your hope and name.

And with your silent prayer, comes back the old
teachings, and vagaries of the boyish heart, in its
reaches toward Heaven. You recal the old church-reckoning
of your goodness: is there much more of it
now, than then? Is not Heaven just as high, and the
world as sadly—broad?

Alas, for the poor tale of goodness, which age brings
to the memory! There may be crowning acts of
benevolence, shining here and there; but the margin
of what has not been done, is very broad. How weak
and insignificant, seems the story of life's goodness, and
profit, when Death begins to slant his shadow upon our
souls! How infinite, in the comparison, seems that
Eternal goodness, which is crowned with mercy. How
self vanishes, like a blasted thing; and only lives—
if it lives at all,—in the glow of that redeeming light,
which radiates from the Cross, and the Throne!