reality of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood
before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing,
both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and
still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech. "We are not of Alice nor of
thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum
father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only
_what might have been_."'

Godwin! Hazlitt! Coleridge! Where now are their 'novel philosophies
and systems'? Bottled moonshine, which does _not_ improve by
keeping.

'Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.'

Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been
as good a man as everyone agrees he was--as kind to his father, as
full of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready
a friend--even though he had paid more heed to current speculations,
it is yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is
laid upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to
point out how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his
speculative contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men
as they were, would one and all have shrunk; how, in short, he
contrived to achieve what no one of his friends, not even the
immaculate Wordsworth or the precise Southey, achieved--the living of
a life, the records of which are inspiriting to read, and are indeed
'the presence of a good diffused;' and managed to do it all without