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. The nobility
will never hereafter, I think, assume or be permitted to rule the nation
in peace, or command armies in war, on any ground except the individual
ability which may appertain to one of their number, as well as to a
commoner. And yet the nobles were never positively more noble than now;
never, perhaps, so chivalrous, so honorable, so highly cultivated; but,
relatively to the rest of the world, they do not maintain their old
place. The pressure of the war has tested and proved this fact, at home
and abroad. At this moment it would be an absurdity in the nobles to
pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago.