WHEN I WAS A BOY?

WHEN I was a boy.-What a store of dear and cherished recollections, long hoarded in memory's richest and rarest treasury, those spell words unlock. They are the " open sesame" to all the visions of young enchantment, that brooded over our fresh imaginations, ere yet harsh contact with the work-day world of reality dulled their hues or dissipated their glory. Even now, in the mere memory, seen through the thickening atmosphere of the shadowy past, how powerfully do they affect us: how strongly do they enchain to themselves the heart's best feelings, gaining in the tender gentleness with which we invest them, an interest, so graceful and touching, that it perhaps more than counterbalances what is lost of their original radiance.

When I was a boy! Surely my nature must have changed since-my mode of existence must have been altered. Can I be that thing of fairy-land, that dweller in a region of fiction and fancy, who used sit for whole days on a ledge of rock (now forming part of the new road leading from M'Sweeny's foundry out through Ballyvolane) conjuring with "open sesame" before its smooth and perpendicular

front, and wondering why the words of power had lost their influence-repeating them with all possible variation of tone and pronunciation, and so satisfied that some day or other would crown my efforts with success, that, lest I should share the fate of Cassim Baba, I had the magic words, written in my pocket, to avoid all possibility of being so overpowered by the splendor, which I felt confident must at length burst upon my dazzled senses, as not to be able again to regain the outer air, before the marauding robbers or absent genii returned to their treasure house. Oh! where are those days and those dreams? those creations of indistinct and undefined loveliness, which the young heart conjured up to satisfy its early yearnings after physical and intellectual beauty; and which-though only more deeply shadowing the disappointment of its matured experience by their contrast with the realities of life-are still fondly cherished, and indelibly marked within the "book and volume of the brain"

"As things that for their grace must be
"Dear—and yet dearer for their mystery ?”

Is that Eden of existence for ever closed? Shall we never again revel in the paradise of boyhood-feeling-shut out,not by the flaming swords of descending cherubim, but by the mocking sneers of earth-born demons who dare us to return? Is it gone, and for ever, that spring-time of young feeling, which shed over nature's fairest forms an atmosphere of additional loveliness; invested even barrenness with beauty,

and "made a sunshine in the shady place?" Oh thou sweet fragrance of the heart return!

But it may not be :-Those glorious and gorgeous visions of the past, that come to us like faint but welcome glimpses of a pre-existent state-like memories of another being, and as if to strengthen the doctrine of the transmigration of souls (for my present cannot be the spirit of my boyhood) are amongst the things that were; never, never to return. There is a gap in the history of existence-a period has dropped out of the life of man; and, like the lost pleiad, boyhood has fallen away from the human system. In a few years one of the stages in Shakspeare's seven ages shall be a puzzle to the commenThere are no boys now, nor have been for

tators.

the last dozen or fifteen years—

Shew me on earth a thing so rare,

I'll own all miracles are true :

Make boyhood once again appear,

And 'tis the utmost heaven can do.

I grant, that you may point out human creatures, varying from three to four feet in height, exact in symmetry of proportion, and young, if you make years the measure of age in this precocious era: but what evidence can you adduce that they are not homunculi? Man's existence now must be counted thus-infancy, childhood, manhood, old age. As in all great changes this lapse of boyhood, from man's progress to futurity, did not occur too suddenly. There was an interregnum of what may be called E 2