An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with
a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven,
and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one
so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was
covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he
brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors
and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full
of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth
wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to
that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road
of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a
wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into
the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping
poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.
Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his
tongue, and he knew now where he was.
Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to
Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the
cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"
But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights
dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon _God's Acre_, and he said,
"These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to
glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I,"
said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again
into his wounds.
His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs,
and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask
left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.
Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed
down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He
looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his
youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers
for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he
said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your
New-Year's wishes and instructions."
In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask
with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through
the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's
night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy
of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face
danced weird and bitter before him.
He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down
upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come
again, O youth, come again!"
And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed
thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream.
But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul
ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair
land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon
his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge;
but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O
beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.