IT is said by a writer, whose celebrity, perhaps, does no great honour to the feelings of human nature, that, let a man die amidst ever so many lamentations, if he could rise from the grave again after the lapse of a few years, or even months, his re-appearance would not be found to be productive of unmingled satisfaction among the friends who had wept over his closing grave. There is much wickedness in this satirical remark, and certainly a great deal of exaggeration; nevertheless, there is perhaps some foundation for it in the truth. This much, at least, we must all have observed, that friends who have been long absent from each other, however they may have lamented their separation, do very seldom, on meeting again, experience all that pleasure which they themselves had expected to derive from being restored to the society of each other. The reason I take to be a very simple one; namely, that however close may have been the intimacy of former days, those who come together again after being long asunder, never do come together the same persons that they parted. In spite of everything, new events have passed over either head; new thoughts, new feelings have left their traces in either bosom: the sorrows of one have not been sympathised with: the joys of another have not been partaken: the mind of each has been occupied, in by far the greater part of its depth, with things of which the other has no knowledge, and can form no guess: and after the first tumult of re-kindled affection is over, the melancholy truth forces itself upon those most reluctant to admit it, that the internal man suffers changes no less surely than the external; and that the mental eye regards remote objects in a way as fallacious as the corporeal.—

and, in like manner, he who, being far off, has been thought of as if he had remained what he was ere he went away, no sooner approaches us once more, than we discover how fondly imagination has been playing with the materials of memory.