I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own
fireside, and with my wife and children about me,--more content to enjoy
what I have,--less anxious for anything beyond it in this life.
My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of
life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare
favorably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been
visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have
dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at
college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I
have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such
progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them
with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of
it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or
thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which
I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody
moved onward, and left me behind. How strange that it should come now,
when I may call myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy, too!
January 3d, 1855.--The progress of the age is trampling over the
aristocratic institutions of England, and they crumble beneath it. This
war has given the country a vast impulse towards democracy.
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