From "New Year's Eve," by Charles Lamb

"Of all the sound of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it withoiut a gathering-up of my mind to a concentratio0n of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as wehn a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed

           I saw the skirts of the departing Year."