Yet buying can be a fine thing. And among genuine presents (and in an honourable place) I certainly include--as I hinted some way back--the presents which people _sometimes make to themselves_. For 'tis a genuine present when a person who never allows himself a superfluity, at last buys one, as Charles and Mary Lamb did their first blue pots and prints, out of slowly saved up pennies. There is in that all the grace of long self-restraint, and the grace of finally triumphant love--love for that faithfully courted object, that Rachel among inanimates! The giving to one's self of such a present is a fit occasion for rejoicing; and 'tis a proper instinct (more proper than the one of displaying wedding presents) which causes the united giver and receiver of the gift to summon the neighbours, to see it and rejoice, not without feasting.
But presents of this sort are even more difficult to compass than the other sort where people, like the lady sung by Heine, have pearls and diamonds in plenty, and all things which mankind can wish.
We stood on the steps of the old Scotch house as the carriage rolled her away. A last greeting from that delightful, unflagging voice; the misty flare of the lanterns round a corner; and then nothing but the darkness of the damp autumn night. There is to some foolish persons--myself especially--a strange and almost supernatural quality about the fact of departure, one's own or that of others, which constant repetition seems, if anything, merely to strengthen. I cannot become familiar with the fact that a moment, the time necessary for a carriage, as in this case, to turn a corner, or for those two steel muscles of the engine to play upon each other, can do so complete and wonderful a thing as to break the continuity of intercourse, to remove a living presence. The substitution of an image for a reality, the present broken off short and replaced by the past; enumerating this by no means gives the equivalent of that odd and unnatural word GONE. And the terror of death itself lies surely in its being the most sudden and utter act of _going away_.
I suppose there must be people who do not feel like this, as there are people also who do not feel, apparently, the mystery of change of place, of watching the familiar lines of hill or valley transform themselves, and the very sense of one's bearings, what was in front or to the other side, east or west, getting lost or hopelessly altered. Such people's lives must be (save for misfortune) funnily undramatic; and, trying to realize them, I understand why such enormous crowds require to go and see plays.