The Silent Isle

I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things come to an end."