All the friends I have ever lost I find again among these visitors.
I love to fancy their spirits hovering about me, feeling still some
earthly kindness for their old companion, and watching his decay.
'He is weaker, he declines apace, he draws nearer and nearer to us,
and will soon be conscious of our existence.' What is there to
alarm me in this? It is encouragement and hope.
These thoughts have never crowded on me half so fast as they have
done to-night. Faces I had long forgotten have become familiar to
me once again; traits I had endeavoured to recall for years have
come before me in an instant; nothing is changed but me; and even I
can be my former self at will.
Raising my eyes but now to the face of my old clock, I remember,
quite involuntarily, the veneration, not unmixed with a sort of
childish awe, with which I used to sit and watch it as it ticked,
unheeded in a dark staircase corner. I recollect looking more
grave and steady when I met its dusty face, as if, having that
strange kind of life within it, and being free from all excess of
vulgar appetite, and warning all the house by night and day, it
were a sage.
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