doing as the scholar does and doing as other people do;) they are
not me, I say; I HAVE them--and, please God, shall soon have better.
For it is not a pleasant thing for a young man, or a young woman
either, I venture to say, to have an old voice, and a wrinkled face,
and weak knees, and gray hair, or no hair at all. And if any moral
Philistine, as our queer German brothers over the Northern fish-pond
would call him, say that this is all rubbish, for that we ARE old, I
would answer: "Of all children how can the children of God be old?"

So little do I give in to calling this outside of me, ME, that I
should not mind presenting a minute description of my own person
such as would at once clear me from any suspicion of vanity in so
introducing myself. Not that my honesty would result in the least
from indifference to the external--but from comparative indifference
to the transitional; not to the transitional in itself, which is of
eternal significance and result, but to the particular form of
imperfection which it may have reached at any individual moment of
its infinite progression towards the complete. For no sooner have I
spoken the word NOW, than that NOW is dead and another is dying;
nay, in such a regard, there is no NOW--only a past of which we know
a little, and a future of which we know far less and far more. But I
will not speak at all of this body of my earthly tabernacle, for it
is on the whole more pleasant to forget all about it. And besides, I
do not want to set any of my readers to whom I would have the
pleasure of speaking far more openly and cordially than if they were
seated on the other side of my writing-table--I do not want to set
them wondering whether the vicar be this vicar or that vicar; or
indeed to run the risk of giving the offence I might give, if I were
anything else than "a wandering voice."