University of Virginia Library

1. PART I.
FROST AND FLIRTATION.

It began to snow. The air softened; the pattering of
the horses' hoofs was muffled with the impeded vibration;
the sleigh glided on with a duller sound; the
large loose flakes fell soft and fast, and the low and

just audible murmur, like the tread of a fairy host,
melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if it
were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth. You
may talk of falling water—of the running of a brook
—of the humming song of an old crone on a sick
vigil—or of the levi susurro of the bees of Hybla,—
but there is nothing like the falling of the snow for
soft and soothing music. You hear it or not as you
will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have
ever a heart-ache, or feel the need of “poppy or
mandragora,” or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary
of the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek
me out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and
veers south, after a frost—say in January. There
shall have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well-trodden.
The road shall be as smooth as the paths
to our first sins—of a seeming perpetual declivity, as
it were—and never a jolt or jar between us and the
edge of the horizon; but all onward and down apparently,
with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in
my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cobweb
cradle for a fairy's child in the trees. One horse
is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around
his neck is a string of fine, small bells, that ring to his
measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and
softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your
seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library,
cushioned and deep, and with a backward and gentle
slope, and you are enveloped to the eye-lids in warm
furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose,
the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow
from your forehead, and with a word, the groom
stands back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully
fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first,
begin to deaden, and the low hum of the alighting
flakes steals gradually on your ear; and soon the hoof-strokes
are as silent as if the steed were shod with
wool, and away you flee through the white air, like
birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery
fleeces of the moon. Your eye-lids fall—forgetfulness
steals upon the senses—a delicious torpor takes possession
of the uneasy blood—and brain and thought
yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It
were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom
may go scathless to the grave; but in my own unworthy
petitions I usually supplicate that my heart
may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne
o' that season.

Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long
seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles
in the hour, (yet not fast enough for our impatience,)
westward from the University gates. The sleighing
had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had
softened for the first time that morning, and assumed
the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened
snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this
is an atmosphere particularly pleasant to breathe, and
Fred, who was making his first move after a six
weeks' fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth,
nostrils expanded, lips parted, and the countenance
altogether of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment.
I had nursed him through his illness, by the
way, in my own rooms, and hence our position as
fellow-travellers. A pressing invitation from his
father to come home with him to Skaneateles, for the
holidays, had diverted me from my usual winter journey
to the North; and for the first time in my life, I
was going upon a long visit to a strange roof. My
imagination had never more business upon its hands.

Fred had described to me, over and over again,
every person I was to meet, brothers, sisters, aunts,
cousins, and friends—a household of thirty people,

guests included; but there was one person among
them of whom his descriptions, amplified as they
were, were very unsatisfactory.

“Is she so very plain?” I asked for the twentieth
time.

“Abominably!”

“And immense black eyes?”

“Saucers!”

“And large mouth?”

“Huge!”

“And very dark?”

“Like a squaw!”

“And skinny hands, did you say?”

“Lean, long, and pokerish!”

“And so very clever?”

“Knows every thing, Phil!”

“But a sweet voice?”

“Um! every body says so.”

“And high temper?”

“She's the devil, Phil! don't ask any more questions
about her.”

“You don't like her then?”

“She never condescends to speak to me; how
should I?”

And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and
employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my
nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like
me or no; for through all Fred's derogatory descriptions,
it was clearly evident that she was the ruling
spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings.

As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper,
and we found that the last storm had been heavier
here than in the country from which we had come.
The occasional farm-houses were almost wholly
buried, the black chimney alone appearing above the
ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows

lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a
descending passage was cut to the threshhold, like the
entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were
quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to
shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under
the visible surface, and their branches loaded with the
still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden.
Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the
road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to
meet even a single sleigh, lest in turning out, the
horses should “slump” beyond their depth, in the untrodden
drifts. The poor animals began to labour severely,
and sunk at every step over their knees in the
clogging and wool-like substance; and the long and
cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like a
boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on.
Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood
suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep
for the strength of the horses; and with the snow-shovels,
which formed a part of the furniture of the
vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our
progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the
hour, and we began to have apprehensions that our
team would give out between the post-houses. Fortunately
it was still warm, for the numbness of cold
would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions.

We had reached the summit of a long hill with the
greatest difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting and
reeking with sweat; the runners of the sleigh were
clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air was
close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still, with
the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I stepped
out to speak to the driver and look forward. It was
a discouraging prospect; a long deep valley lay before
us, closed at the distance of a couple of miles by another
steep hill, through a cleft in the top of which lay

our way. We could not even distinguish the line of
the road between. Our disheartened animals stood at
this moment buried to their breasts, and to get forward
without rearing at every step seemed impossible. The
driver sat on his box looking uneasily down into the
valley. It was one undulating ocean of snow, not a
sign of a human habitation to be seen, and even the
trees indistinguishable from the general mass, by their
whitened and overladen branches. The storm had
ceased, but the usual sharp cold that succeeds a warm
fall of snow had not yet lightened the clamminess of
the new-fallen flakes, and they clung around the foot
like clay, rendering every step a toil.

“Your leaders are quite blown,” I said to the driver,
as he slid off his uncomfortable seat.

“Pretty nearly, sir.”

“And your wheelers are not much better.”

“Sca'cely.”

“And what do you think of the weather?”

“It'll be darnation cold in an hour.” As he spoke
he looked up to the sky, which was already peeling
off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an orange,
and looked as hard and cold as marble between the
widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more chilling
temperature followed immediately upon his prediction,
and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh flew clear of
their slight pillars, and shook off their fringes of icicles.

“Could you shovel a little, Mister?” said the driver,
handing me one of the broad wooden utensils from his
foot-board, and commencing himself, after having
thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid cake of
the moist snow at the side of the road.

“It's just to make a place to rub down them creturs,”
said he, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to know
what he was going to do.

Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted

the vehicle a little, and tied down the flapping curtains,
he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heartily
to work with my shovel. In a few minutes, taking
advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a
small area of frozen ground, and releasing the tired
animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down
with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The
persevering driver then cleared the runners of their
iced and clinging masses, and a half hour having
elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box,
and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again
to their traces.

We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had
settled, and for the first mile it was down hill, and
we got on with comparative ease. The sky was by
this time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of clouds
alone settling on the horizon in the quarter of the
wind, while the sun, as powerless as moonlight,
poured with dazzling splendor on the snow, and the
gusts came keen and bitter across the sparkling waste,
rimming the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and
penetrating to the innermost nerve, with their pungent
iciness. No protection seemed of any avail.
The whole surface of the body ached as if it were
laid against a slab of ice. The throat closed instinctively,
and contracted its unpleasant respiration—
the body and limbs drew irresistibly together, to economize,
like a hedge-hog, the exposed surface—the hands
and feet felt transmuted to lead—and across the forehead,
below the pressure of the cap, there was a
binding and oppressive ache, as if a bar of frosty
iron had been let into the skull. The mind, meantime,
seemed freezing up—unwillingness to stir, and
inability to think of any thing but the cold, becoming
every instant more decided.

From the bend of the valley our difficulties became

more serious. The drifts often lay across the road
like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses,
and we had dug through one or two, and had been
once upset, and often near it, before we came to the
steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this
time begun to feel the excitement of the rum, and
bounded on through the snow with continual leaps,
jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that
threatened momently to break the traces. The steam
from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them
with a coat like hoar-frost, and spite of their heat,
and the unnatural and violent exertions they were
making, it was evident by the pricking of their ears,
and the sudden crouch of the body when a stronger
blast swept over, that the cold struck through even
their hot and intoxicated blood.

We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed miraculous
to me that the now infuriated animals did not
burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one
of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on
after them, stopping dead and short at every other
moment, and reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat
in a surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime
taken place upon the surface of the moist snow,
and the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on
the blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting
the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle-points.
The driver and his maddened but almost
exhausted team were blinded by the glittering and
whirling eddies, the cold grew intenser every moment,
the forward motion gradually less and less, and
when, with the very last effort apparently, we reached
a spot on the summit of the hill, which, from its
exposed situation, had been kept bare by the wind,
the patient and persevering whip brought his horses
to a stand, and despaired, for the first time, of his prospects

of getting on. I crept out of the sleigh, the
iron-bound runners of which now grated on the bare
ground, but found it impossible to stand upright.

“If you can use your hands,” said the driver,
turning his back to the wind which stung the face
like the lash of a whip, “I'll trouble you to untackle
them horses.”

I set about it, while he buried his hands and face
in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the
agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as
I pushed them aside, and every vein stood out from
their bodies like ropes under the skin.

“What are you going to do?” I asked, as he joined
me again, and taking off the harness of one of the
leaders, flung it into the snow.

“Ride for life!” was his ominous answer.

“Good God! and what is to become of my sick
friend?”

“The Almighty knows—if he can't ride to the
tavern!”

I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in
the bottom of the sleigh almost frozen to death, informed
him of the driver's decision, and asked him if
he thought he could ride one of the horses. He was
beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of death
by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With
the driver's assistance, however, I lifted him out of the
sleigh, shook him soundly, and making stirrups of the
traces, set him upon one of the horses, and started
him off before us. The poor beasts seemed to have a
presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and though
stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep
drift which blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly
on. The cold in our exposed position was agonizing.
Every small fibre in the skin of my own face felt
splitting and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of

ice. Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only
press with my knees to the horse's side, and the whole
collected energy of my frame seemed expended in the
exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had
still the use of his arm, and rode behind, flogging the
poor animals on, whose every step seemed to be the
last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was
rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was exceedingly
painful to the sight, and there was no
warmth in its beams. I could see my poor friend
drooping gradually to the neck of his horse, but until
he should drop off it was impossible to assist him, and
his faithful animal still waded on. I felt my own
strength fast ebbing away. If I had been alone, I
should certainly have lain down, with the almost irresistible
inclination to sleep, but the thought of my
friend, and the shouting of the energetic driver,
nerved me from time to time, and with hands hanging
helplessly down, and elbows fastened convulsively to
my side, we plunged and struggled painfully forward.
I but remember being taken afterwards to a fire, and
shrinking from it with a shriek—the suffering of reviving
consciousness was so intolerable. We had
reached the tavern literally frozen upon our horses.

2. II.

I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at
the breakfast table, the morning after our arrival, when
Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my virtues
as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same moment,
he said simply in parenthesis, “My cousin Edith,
Mr. Slingsby,” and went on with his story. I rose
and bowed, and as Fred had the parole, I had time to
collect my courage, and take a look at the enemy's
camp—for, of that considerable household, I felt my
star to be in conjunction or opposition with hers, only

who was at that moment my vis-à-vis across a dish of
stewed oysters.

In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait painting,
I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I
see at this moment, (I have carried it about the world
for ten years,) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age
in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in
that time from dread or admiration, or something between
these, to pity; she was so unscrupulously and
hopelessly plain—so wretchedly ill and suffering in
her aspect—so spiritless and unhappy in every motion
and look. “I'll win her heart,” thought I, “by being
kind to her. Poor thing! it will be something new to
her, I dare say!” Oh, Philip Slingsby! what a doomed
donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy.

And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her untasted
breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy—with her
large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow
complexion, and not one redeeming feature—there was
something in her face which produced a phantom of
beauty in my mind—a glimpse, a shadowing of a countenance
that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at her
last innocent orison—a loveliness moulded and exalted
by superhuman and overpowering mind—instinct
through all its sweetness with energy and fire. So
strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my thoughts
of her as an angel in heaven, (for I supposed her dying
for many a month, and a future existence was her own
most frequent theme,) she always rose to my fancy
with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly lovely.
And this, too with a face of her own, a bonâ fide physiognomy,
that must have made a mirror an unpleasant
article of furniture in her chamber.

I have no suspicion in my own mind, whether Time
was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of
those Christmas holidays. The second Saturday had

come round, and I just remember that Fred was very
much out of humour with me for having appeared to
his friends to be every thing he had said I was not, and
nothing he had said I was. He had described me as the
most uproarious, noisy, good-humoured, and agreeable
dog in the world. And I was not that at all—particularly
the last. The old judge told him he had not
improved in his penetration at the University.

A week! and what a life had been clasped within
its brief calendar, for me! Edith Linsey was two
years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She
was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of
consumption; and it was little matter whom she loved,
or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by
a new affection, she could beguile the preying melancholy
of illness; for by that gentle name they called,
in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of character
that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have
been endured for a day. But she was not capricious,
or bitter to me! Oh no! And from the very extreme
of her impatience with others—from her rudeness, her
violence, her sarcasm—she came to me with a heart
softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and
weighed every word that might give me offence, and
watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was humble,
and generous, and passionately loving and dependant.
Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She
gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate
abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar
character, but more to her own solemn conviction that
she was dying—that her best hope of life was not
worth a week's purchase.

We had begun with books, and upon them her past
enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her
favourite authors with a passion. They had relieved
her heart; and there was nothing of poetry or philosophy

that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not
steeped her very soul. How well I remember her repeating
to me from Shelley, those glorious lines to the
soaring swan—

There was a long room in the southern wing of
the house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtained,
dim old place, with deep-embayed windows,
and so many nooks, and so much furniture, that there
was that hushed air, that absence of echo within it,
which is the great charm of a haunt for study or
thought. It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock
the door, if she pleased, or shut or open the windows;
in short, when she was there, no one thought of disturbing
her, and she was like a “spirit in its cell,” invisible
and inviolate. And here I drank into my very
life and soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been
locked till (as we both thought) the last hour of its
life,—a flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran
my heart like lava, sweeping every thing into its
resistless fire, and (may God forgive her!) leaving it
scorched and desolate when its mocking brightness
had gone out.

I remember that “Elia”—Charles Lamb's Elia—
was the favourite of favourites among her books; and
partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved author
reminded me to look it up, and partly to have time to
draw back my indifference over a subject that it something

stirs me to recall, you shall read an imitation
(or continuation, if you will,) that I did for Edith's eye,
of his “Essay on Books and Reading.” I sat with
her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read it to
her, and the fingers of Pysche were never fairer to Canova
than they to me.

“It is a little singular,” I began, (looking into her
eyes as long as I could remember what I had written,)
“that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which
the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought
of writing a book upon `Reading.' The refinements
of the true epicure in books are surely as various as
those of the gastronome and the opium-eater; and I
can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural
occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless
it is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indolence,
has never numbered among its votaries one of
the busy craft of writers.

“The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for
hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true
secret of the thing is no more adapted to their comprehension,
than the sublimations of Louis Eustache Ude
for the taste of a day-labourer. The refined reading-taste,
like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got
beyond appetite—gross appetite. It shall be that of a
man who, having fed through childhood and youth on
simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the
apotheosis of learning—the spiritual nare. There
are, it is true, instances of a keen natural relish: a boy
as you will sometimes find one, of a premature thoughtfulness,
will carry a favourite author in his bosom, and
feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the
exquisite story:—

“The pleasure as well as the profit of reading depends
as much upon time and manner, as upon the
book. The mind is an opal—changing its colour
with every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially
necessary. A muscle strained, a nerve unpoised,
an admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are
slight circumstances; but a feather may tickle the
dreamer from paradise to earth. `Many a froward
axiom,' says a refined writer, `many an inhumane
thought hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or
from a want of symmetry in your chamber.' Who
has not felt, at times, an unnaccountable disrelish for
a favourite author? Who has not, by a sudden noise
in the street, been startled from a reading dream, and
found, afterwards, that the broken spell was not to
be re-wound? An ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich
harmonies of Taylor. You would not think Barry
Cornwall the delicious heart he is, reading him in a
tottering chair.

“There is much in the mood with which you come
to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the
good-humour of an author seems unnatural. I think
I should scarce relish the `gentle spiriting' of Ariel
with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had
been touched by the unkindness of a friend, Jack
Falstaff would not move me to laughter as easily as
he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however,
to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than
which there is nothing more exquisite in Nature. To
go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy

influences of the hour—stillness, and purity, and
balm—to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind
will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to
come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a temper
of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark's, and
sit down to Milton, or Spenser, or, almost loftier still,
the divine `Prometheus' of Shelley, has seemed to
me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be
human. The great secret of such pleasure is sympathy.
You must climb to the eagle poet's eyrie. You
must have senses, like his, for the music that is only
audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty that
is visible only to the spirit-eye of a clear and, for the
time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure of
the magician's own time and season must be upon
you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a
bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but
after rushing into the eye of the wind with a fleet
horse, with all his gallant pride and glorious strength
and fire obedient to your rein, and so mingling, as it
will, with his rider's consciousness, that you feel as
if you were gifted in your own body with the swiftness
and energy of an angel;—after this, to sit down
to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of delusion,
to my mind scarce less than reality. I never
envied Napoleon till I heard it was his habit, after a
battle, to read Ossian.

“You cannot often read to music. But I love,
when the voluntary is pealing in church,—every
breath in the congregation suppressed, and the deep-volumed
notes pouring through the arches of the
roof with the sublime and almost articulate praise
of the organ,—to read, from the pew Bible, the book
of Ecclesiastes. The solemn stateliness of its periods
is fitted to music like a hymn. It is to me a spring of
the most thrilling devotion,—though I shame to confess

that the richness of its Eastern imagery, and,
above all, the inimitable beauty of its philosophy,
stand out somewhat definitely in the reminiscences of
the hour.

“A taste for reading comes comparatively late.
`Robinson Crusoe' will turn a boy's head at ten.
The `Arabian Nights' are taken to bed with us at
twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the
`Lady of the Lake,' `Tom Jones,' and `Peregrine
Pickle;' and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for
Shakspeare, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton.
Most men do not read these last with a true relish till
after this period. The hidden beauties of standard
authors break upon the mind by surprise. It is like
discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take
up the book in an idle moment, as you have done a
thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you
turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to admire,
when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press
close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the passage
you have chanced upon chains you like a spell,
—it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton's `Comus'
flashed upon me in this way. I never could
read the `Rape of the Lock' till a friend quoted some
passages from it during a walk. I know no more exquisite
sensation than this warming of the heart to an
old author; and it seems to me that the most delicious
portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in
which, one by one, the great minds of old are admitted
with all their time-mellowed worth to the affections.
With what delight I read, for the first time,
the `kind-hearted plays' of Beaumont and Fletcher!
How I doated on Burton! What treasures to me were
the `Fairy Queen' and the Lyrics of Milton!

“I used to think, when studying the Greek and
Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school-author

was a fair offset against immortality. I would
as lief, it seemed to me, have my verses handed down
by the town-crier. But latterly, after an interval of a
few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical
school copies with the hard places all thumbed and
pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure.
It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the
riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line,
—finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what
once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The
associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old
distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a reperusal.
I could see now what brightened the sunken
eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the
hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delinquent,
to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a
dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of Herodotus,
and the strong-woven style of Thucydides,
and the magnificent invention of Eschylus. I took
an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the
next room scan it perpetually through his nose.
There is no music for me in the `Iliad.' But, spite of
the recollections scored alike upon my palm and the
margin, I own to an Augustan relish for the smooth
melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime
troublesome ferule,—enjoying by its aid the raciness
of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of
Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom I put
down in my will that self of defaced classics.

“There are some books that bear reading pleasantly
once a year. `Tristram Shandy' is an annual with
me. I read him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy
Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a
good table-book, to be used when you would collect
your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of
taste need never want for Sunday reading while he

can find the Sermons of Taylor, and South, and Fuller—writers
of good theological repute—though, between
ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted
with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style,
than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a
quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf,
or Milton's Prose Works, or Bacon. These are
healthful moods of the mind when lighter nutriment
is distasteful.

“I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine
myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of
late runs shallow. Shelley's (peace to his passionate
heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and
Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Cornwall
have been to the fountain's lip, feeding their
imaginations, (the latter his heart as well,) but they
have brought back little for the world. The `small
silver stream' will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to
us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close
nearer and nearer upon the `pure English undefiled.'
The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe)
will have Parnassus to themselves.

“The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden.
You cannot, with your choicest appliances for the
body, always command the many-toned mind. In the
twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed
chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June
wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the
window, and in your hand some Russia-bound rambling
old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humoured and
quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to
be conjured. Yet often, after spending a morning
hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind unhinged,
and strolled off with a book in my pocket to
the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended
upon me under some chance tree; with a crooked root

under my head, and I have lain there, reading and
sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the
dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that
it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfatigued
for hours on the steps of a library; or in a
shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of
customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will
not divert you till you have read out the chapter.

“I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I am
an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic excites
me. But, for its connexion with the subject upon
which I am writing, I must conclude these rambling
observations with a late mysterious visitation of my
own.

“I had, during the last year, given up the early
summer tea-parties common in the town in which the
University stands; and having, of course, three or
four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an
afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspeare
came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundreth
time upon what I think his (and the world's) most
delicate creation—the `Tempest.' The twilight of
the first day overtook me at the third act, where the
banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy
troop of Prospero, and set before the shipwrecked king
and his followers. I closed the book, and, leaning
back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd of
images which throng always upon the traces of Shakspeare.
The fancy music was still in my mind, when
an apparently real strain of the most solemn melody
came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me, as it reached
it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low. I was
not startled, but lay quietly, holding my breath, and
more fearing when the strain would be broken, than
curious whence it came. The twilight deepened, till
it was dark, and it still played on, changing the tune

at intervals, but always of the same melancholy sweetness;
till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and, giving
in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading began
to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his delicate
ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban,
came moving before me to the measure, as bright and
vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the midst of
it by Alfonse, who came in at the usual hour with my
tea; and, on starting to my feet, I listened in vain for
the continuance of the music. I sat thinking of it
awhile, but dismissed it at last, and went out to enjoy,
in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the summer night.
The next day I resumed my book, with a smile at my
previous credulity, and had read through the last
scenes of the `Tempest,' when the light failed me. I
again closed the book, and presently again, as if the
sympathy was instantaneous, the strain broke in, playing
the same low and solemn melodies, and falling
with the same dying cadence upon the ear. I listened
to it, as before, with breathless attention; abandoned
myself once more to its irresistible spell; and, half-waking,
half-sleeping, fell again into a vivid dream,
brilliant as fairy-land, and creating itself to the measures
of the still audible music. I could not now shake
off my belief in its reality; but I was so wrapt with its
strange sweetness, and the beauty of my dream, that I
cared not whether it came from earth or air. My indifference,
singularly enough, continued for several
days; and, regularly at twilight, I threw aside my
book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness for the
music. It never failed me, and its results were as
constant as its coming. Whatever I had read,—sometimes
a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a play,
or a chapter of romance,—the scene rose before me
with the stately reality of a pageant. At last I began
to think of it more seriously; and it was a relief to me
one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than usual
with a message. I told him to stand perfectly still;
and after a minute's pause, during which I heard distinctly
an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked
him if he heard any music? He said he did not. My
blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him
listen once more. Still he heard nothing. I could
endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and
audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room
as he left me, shuddering to be left alone.

“The next day I thought of nothing but death.
Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mysterious
voices, were things I had believed in speculatively
for years, and now their truth came upon me
like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment
about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with
every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with
it, like a summons from the grave, a `dead march'
swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at
heart. This could not be fancy; and why was it, as
I thought I has proved, audible to my ear alone? I
threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool
north wind refreshed me; but, as if to mock my
attempts at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the instant,
with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and
rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step
seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hurried
on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly louder,
till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely
burying-ground of New Haven, I came suddenly upon
—a bell-foundry! In the rear had lately been hung,
for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the New
Trinity Church, and the master of the establishment
informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine
player, and every day after his work, he was in the
habit of amusing himself with the `Dead March in

Saul,' the `Marsellois Hymn,' and other melancholy
and easy tunes, muffling the hammers that he might
not disturb the neighbors.”

I have had my reward for these speculations, dear
reader—a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in
the innermost recess of memory—and I care not much
(without offence) whether you like it or no. She
thanked me—she thought it well done—she laid her
head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of
the Flemings, and every word has been “paid for in
fairy gold.”

I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unravel
it, and I cannot well see how I shall come to the
end, without trespassing on your patience. We will
cut it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause;
but before I close, I must give you a little instance of
how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith
had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds
of embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pretty
for use, and what I would show you are my verses
on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in
aught save the “Gradus ad Parnassum,” I must own
I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille
(faded now from its glory, and worn with travel—but
O how cherished!) with a pleasant feeling of paternity: