The dome of Boston State House, which is the centre of my
little universe, was glittering in its fresh golden pellicle before I
had reached the scriptural boundary of life. It has lost its lustre now,
and the years which have dulled its surface have whitened the dome of
that fragile structure in which my consciousness holds the session of
its faculties. Time is not to be cheated. It is easy to talk of
perennial youth, and to toy with the flattering fictions which every
ancient personage accepts as true so far as he himself is concerned, and
laughs at as foolish talk when he hears them applied to others. When, in
my exulting immaturity, I wrote the lines not unknown to the reading
public under the name of "The Last Leaf", I spoke of the possibility
that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds and blossoms
of a new spring were opening and spreading all around me. I am not as
yet the solitary survivor of my literary contemporaries, and,
remembering who my few coevals are, it may well be hoped that I shall
not be. But I feel lonely, very lonely, in the pages through which I
wander. These are new names in the midst of which I find my own.
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