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!"

Ay, 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 wantoning,—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 on 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 schoolroom, 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 hoiden,—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 recall 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 come back the old teachings, and vagaries of the boyish heart in its reaches toward Heaven. You recall 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!