University of Virginia Library

EDITH LINSEY.

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:

2. PART II.
LOVE AND SPECULATION.

Edith Linsey was religious. There are many
intensifiers (a new word, that I can't get on without:
I submit it for admission into the language;)—there
are many intensifiers, I say, to the passion of love;
such as pride, jealousy, poetry, (money, sometimes,
Dio mio!) and idleness:[1] but, if the experience of
one who first studied the Art of Love in an “Evangelical”
country is worth a para, there is nothing
within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the tender
passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently.
The human being that loves us throws the value of
its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more.
Love's best alchymy can only turn into affection what
is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical,
the selfish, the weak, can, and do, fling their vanity,
pride, poetry, selfishness, and weakness, into a first
passion; but these are earthly elements, and there is
an antagonism in their natures that is for ever striving
to resolve them back to their original earth. But
religion is of the soul as well as the heart,—the mind

as well as the affections,—and when it mingles in
love, it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an
unworthy and else perishable mixture.

Edith's religion was equally witout cant, and
without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived
at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never
counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of
the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellectual
exaltation than a humility of heart. She thought
of God because the subject was illimitable, and her
powerful imagination found in it the scope for which
she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and
disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues
with a frame worn down with disease, and she was
removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from
the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life
the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the fulness
of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when
on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and
mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity,
was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always
require rhyme and reason of language and tears.

There are many persons of religious feeling who,
from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct themselves
as if to express a devout sentiment was a want
of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these.
Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied
without exception to every pursuit and affection. She
used it as a painter ventures on a daring colour, or a
musician a new string in his instrument. She felt
that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship,
or love, or what you will, by making it a steppingstone
to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as
she did of breathing and sleep, and talked of subjects
which the serious usually enter upon with a suppressed
breath, as she would comment upon a poem or

define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an
impressiveness this threw over her in every thing;
how elevated she seemed above the best of those
about her; and with what a worshipping and half-reverent
admiration she inspired all whom she did not
utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was
drank up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and
I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxication.
I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth.
I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spotless
from sin, as a “cherub with his breast upon his
lute; and I knelt by her when she prayed, and held
her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and exhaustion,
and sat at her feet with my face in her hands
listening to her wild speculations (often till the morning
brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and
irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers,
which seems to me now like a recollection of another
life,—it were, with this conscious body and mind, a
self-relinquishment so impossible!

Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst
of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated
people about us, we were as separated from them as if
the ring of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred
wished me joy of my giraffe, as he offensively called
his cousin, and his sisters, who were quite too pretty to
have been left out of my story so long, were more indulgent,
I thought, to the indigenous beaux of Skaneateles
than those aboriginal specimens had a right to
expect; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for
any thing but Edith. The library became a forbidden
spot to all feet but ours; we met at noon after our late
vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set
apart for our tête-à-tête drives over the frozen lake,
and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle
with a special reference to Philip Slingsby's happiness.

I wonder whether an angel out of heaven would have
made me believe that I should ever write the story of
those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer! I
tell thee, Edith! (for thou wilt read every line that I
have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst feel any
thing,) that I have read “Faust” since, and thought
thee Mephistopheles! I have looked on thee since,
with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood
of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world
and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and
idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-questioning
if thou hadst given back my soul that was
thine own! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown
beautiful that wert so hideous—the wonder-wrought
miracle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and
breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature;
but it is not thy beauty; no, nor thy enthronement
in the admiration of thy woman's world. These
are little to me; for I saw thy loveliness from the first,
and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a
thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their
life-time. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable
power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here,
in another land, with an ocean weltering between us,
and anatomize the character that I alone have read
truly and too well, for the instruction of the world, (its
amusement, too, proud woman,—thou wilt writhe at
that;)—but I confess to a natural and irresistible obedience
to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would
not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. I
would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the
devil as soon.

How little even the most instructed women know
the secret of this power! They make the mistake of
cultivating only their own minds. They think that,
by self-elevation, they will climb up to the intellects

of men, and win them by seeming their equals. Shallow
philosophers! You never remember that to subdue
a human being to your will, it is more necessary
to know his mind than your own,—that, in conquering
a heart vanity is the first out-post,—that while you are
employing your wits in thinking how most effectually
to dazzle him, you should be sounding his character
for its undeveloped powers to assist him to dazzle you,
—that love is a reflected light, and to be pleased with
others we must be first pleased with ourselves!

Edith (it has occurred to me in my speculations
since) seemed to me always an echo of myself. She
expressed my thought as it sprang into my brain. I
thought that in her I had met my double and counterpart,
with the reservation that I was a little the
stronger spirit, and that in my mind lay the material
of the eloquence that flowed from her lips,—as the
almond that you endeavor to split equally leaves the
kernel in the deeper cavity of its shell. Whatever the
topic, she seemed using my thoughts, anticipating my
reflections, and, with an unobtrusive but thrilling flattery,
referring me to myself for the truth of what I
must know was but a suggestion of my own! O! Lucrezia
Borgia! if Machiavelli had but practised that
subtle cunning upon thee, thou wouldst have had little
space in thy delirious heart for the passion that, in the
history of crime, has made thee the marvel and the
monster.

The charm of Edith to most people was that she
was no sublimation. Her mind seemed of any or no
stature. She was as natural, and earnest, and as satisfied
to converse on the meanest subject as on the
highest. She overpowered nobody. She (apparently)
eclipsed nobody. Her passionate and powerful eloquence
was only lavished on the passionate and powerful.
She never misapplied herself: and what a

secret of influence and superiority is contained in this
single phrase! We so hate him who out-measures us
as we stand side by side before the world!

I have in my portfolio several numbers of a manuscript
“Gazette,” with which the Flemings amused
themselves during the deep snows of the winter
which I visited them. It was contributed to by everybody
in the house, and read aloud at the breakfast
table on the day of its weekly appearance, and, quite
apropos to these remarks upon the universality of
Edith's mind, there is in one of them an essay of her
on what she calls minute philosophies. It is curious
as showing how, with all her loftiness of speculation,
she descended sometimes to the examination of the
smallest machinery of enjoyment.

“The principal sources of every-day happiness,” (I
am copying out a part of the essay, dear reader,) “are
too obvious to need a place in a chapter of breakfast
table philosophy. Occupation and a clear conscience
the very truant in the fields will tell you, are craving
necessities. But when these are secured, there are
lighter matters, which, to the sensitive and educated
at least, are to happiness what foliage is to the tree.
They are refinements which add to the beauty of life
without diminishing its strength; and, as they spring
only from a better use of our common gifts, they are
neither costly nor rare. I have learned secrets under
the roof of a poor man, which would add to the luxury
of the rich. The blessings of a cheerful fancy and a
quick eye come from nature, and the trailing of a vine
may develope them as well as the curtaining of a king's
chamber.

“Riding and driving are such stimulating pleasures,
that to talk of any management in their indulgence
seems superfluous. Yet we are, in motion or at rest,
equally liable to the caprices of feeling, and, perhaps,

the gayer the mood the deeper the shade cast on it by
untoward circumstances. The time of riding should
never be regular. It then becomes a habit, and
habits, though sometimes comfortable, never amount
to positive pleasure. I would ride when nature
prompted—when the shower was past, or the air
balmy, or the sky beautiful—whenever, and where-ever
the significant finger of Desire pointed. Oh! to
leap into the saddle when the west-wind blows freshly,
and gallop off into its very eye, with an undrawn rein,
careless how far or whither; or, to spring up from a
book when the sun breaks through after a storm, and
drive away under the white clouds, through light and
shadow, while the trees are wet and the earth damp
and spicy; or, in the clear sunny afternoons of autumn,
with a pleasant companion on the seat beside
you, and the glorious splendour of the decaying foliage
flushing in the sunshine, to loiter up the valley
dreaming over the thousand airy castles that are
stirred by such shifting beauty—these are pleasures
indeed, and such as he who rides regularly after his
dinner knows as little of as the dray-horse of the exultation
of the courser.

“There is a great deal in the choice of a companion.
If he is an indifferent acquaintance, or an indiscriminate
talker, or has a coarse eye for beauty, or is
insensible to the delicacies of sensation or thought—if
he is sensual, or stupid, or practical constitutionally—
he will never do. He must be a man who can detect
a rare colour in a leaf, or appreciate a peculiar passage
in scenery, or admire a grand outline in a cloud; he
must have accurate and fine senses, and a heart, noble
at least by nature, and subject still to her direct influences;
he must be a lover of the beautiful in whatever
shape it comes; and, above all, he must have
read and thought like a scholar, if not like a poet.

He will then ride by your side without crossing your
humour—if talkative, he will talk well, and if silent,
you are content, for you know that the same grandeur
or beauty which has wrought the silence, in
your own thoughts has given a colour to his.

“There is much in the manner of driving. I like
a capricious rein—now fast through a hollow, and
now loiteringly on the edge of a road or by the bank
of a river. There is a singular delight in quickening
your speed in the animation of a climax, and in
coming down gently to a walk with a digression of
feeling, or a sudden sadness.

“An important item in household matters is the
management of light. A small room well-lighted is
much more imposing than a large one lighted ill.
Cross lights are painful to the eye, and they destroy
besides the cool and picturesque shadows of the furniture
and figures. I would have a room always partially
darkened: there is a repose in the twilight dimness
of a drawing-room which affects one with the
proper gentleness of the place: the out-of-door humour
of men is too rude, and the secluded light subdues
them fitly as they enter. I like curtains—heavy, and
of the richest material: there is a magnificence in
large crimson folds which nothing else equals, and
the colour gives every thing a beautiful tint as the
light streams through them. Plants tastefully arranged
are pretty; flowers are always beautiful. I
would have my own room like a painter's—one curtain
partly drawn; a double shadow has a nervous
look. The effect of a proper disposal of light upon
the feelings is by most people surprisingly neglected.
I have no doubt that as an habitual thing it materially
affects the character; the disposition for study and
thought is certainly dependent on it in no slight degree.
What is more contemplative than the twilight

of a deep alcove in a library? What more awakens
thought than the dim interior of an old church with
its massive and shadowy pillars?

“There may be the most exquisite luxury in furniture.
A crowded room has a look of comfort, and
suspended lamps throw a mellow depth into the features.
Descending light is always the most becoming;
it deepens the eye, and distributes the shadows in the
face judiciously. Chairs should be of different and
curious fashions, made to humor every possible
weariness. A spice-lamp should burn in the corner,
and the pictures should be coloured of a pleasant tone,
and the subjects should be subdued and dreamy. It
should be a place you would live in for a century
without an uncomfortable thought. I hate a neat
room. A dozen of the finest old authors should lie
about, and a new novel, and the last new prints. I
rather like the French fashion of a bonbonniere,
though that perhaps is an extravagance.

“There is a management of one's own familiar intercourse
which is more neglected, and at the same
time more important to happiness, than every other;
it is particularly a pity that this is not oftener understood
by newly-married people; as far as my own
observation goes, I have rarely failed to detect, far
too early, signs of ill-disguised and disappointed
weariness. It was not the re-action of excitement—
not the return to the quiet ways of home—but a new
manner—a forgetful indifference, believing itself concealed,
and yet betraying itself continually by unconscious
and irrepressible symptoms. I believe it resulted
oftenest from the same causes—partly, that they saw
each other too much, and partly that when the form
of etiquette was removed, they forgot to retain its
invaluable essence—an assiduous and minute disinterestedness.
It seems nonsense to lovers, but absence

is the secret of respect, and therefore of affection.
Love is divine, but its flame is too delicate for a perpetual
household lamp; it should be burned only for
incense, and even then trimmed skilfully. It is wonderful
how a slight neglect, or a glimpse of a weakness,
or a chance defect of knowledge, dims its new
glory. Lovers, married or single, should have separate
pursuits—they should meet to respect each other
for new and distinct acquisitions. It is the weakness
of human affections that they are founded on pride,
and waste with over much familiarity. And oh, the
delight to meet after hours of absence—to sit down
by the evening lamp, and with a mind unexhausted
by the intercourse of the day, to yield to the fascinating
freedom of conversation, and clothe the rising
thoughts of affection in fresh and unhackneyed language!
How richly the treasures of the mind are
coloured—not doled out, counter by counter, as the
visible machinery of thought coins them, but heaped
upon the mutual altar in lavish and unhesitating profusion!
And how a bold fancy assumes beauty and
power—not traced up through all its petty springs till
its dignity is lost by association, but flashing full-grown
and suddenly on the sense! The gifts of no
one mind are equal to the constant draught of a life-time,
and, even if they were, there is no one taste
which could always relish them. It is a humiliating
thought that immortal mind must be husbanded like
material treasure!

“There is a remark of Godwin's, which, in rather
too strong language, contains a valuable truth. `A
judicious and limited voluptuousness,' he says, `is necessary
to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing
of the manners, to the refinement of the sentiment,
and to the development of the understanding; and
a woman deficient in this respect may be of use in the

government of our families, but cannot add to the enjoyment,
nor fix the partiality of a man of taste!'
Since the days when `St. Leon' was written, the word
by which the author expressed his meaning is grown
perhaps into disrepute, but the remark is still one
of keen and observant discrimination. It refers (at
least so I take it) to that susceptibility to delicate
attentions, that fine sense of the nameless and exquisite
tenderness of manner and thought, which constitute
in the minds of its possessors the deepest undercurrent
of life—the felt and treasured, but unseen
and inexpressible richness of affection. It is rarely
found in the characters of men, but it outweights, when
it is, all grosser qualities—for its possession implies a
generous nature, purity, fine affections, and a heart
open to all the sunshine and meaning of the universe.
It belongs more to the nature of woman; but indispensable
as it is to her character, it is oftener than anything
else, wanting. And without it, what is she?
What is love to a being of such dull sense that she
hears only its common and audible language, and sees
nothing but what it brings to her feet, to be eaten, and
worn, and looked upon? What is woman, if the impassioned
language of the eye, or the deepened fulness
of the tone, or the tenderness of a slight attention,
are things unnoticed and of no value?—one who
answers you when you speak, smiles when you tell
her she is grave, assents barely to the expression of
your enthusiasm, but has no dream beyond—no suspicion
that she has not felt and reciprocated your feelings
as fully as you could expect or desire? It is a
matter too little looked to. Sensitive and ardent men
too often marry with a blindfold admiration of mere
goodness or loveliness. The abandon of matrimony
soon dissipates the gay dream, and they find themselves
suddenly unsphered, linked indissolubly with
affections strangely different from their own, and
lavishing their only treasure on those who can neither
appreciate nor return it. The after-life of such men
is a stifling solitude of feeling. Their avenues of enjoyment
are their maniform sympathies, and when
these are shut up or neglected, the heart is dark, and
they have nothing to do thenceforward but to forget.

“There are many, who, possessed of the capacity
for the more elevated affections, waste and lose it by
a careless and often unconscious neglect. It is not a
plant to grow untended. The breath of indifference,
or a rude touch, may destroy for ever its delicate texture.
To drop the figure, there is a daily attention to
the slight courtesies of life, and an artifice in detecting
the passing shadows of feeling, which alone can preserve,
through life, the first freshness of passion. The
easy surprises of pleasure, and earnest cheerfulness of
assent to slight wishes, the habitual respect to opinions,
the polite abstinence from personal topics in the
company of others, the assiduous and unwavering
attention to her comfort at home and abroad, and, above
all, the absolute preservation in private of those proprieties
of conversation and manner which are sacred
before the world, are some of the thousand secrets of
that rare happiness which age and habit alike fail to
impair or diminish.”

2. II.

Vacation was over, but Fred and myself were still
lingering at Fleming Farm. The roads were impassable
with a premature THAW. Perhaps there is nothing
so peculiar in American meteorology as the phenomenon
which I alone probably, of all the imprisoned
inhabitants of Skaneateles, attributed to a kind and
“special Providence.” Summer had come back, like
Napoleon from Elba, and astonished usurping Winter

in the plenitude of apparent possession and security.
No cloud foreboded the change, as no alarm preceded
the apparition of the child of destiny.” We awoke on
a February morning, with the snow lying chin-deep
on the earth, and it was June! The air was soft and
warm—the sky was clear and of the milky cerulean
of chrysoprase—the South wind (the same, save his
unperfumed wings, who had crept off like a satiated
lover in October) stole back suddenly from the tropics,
and found his flowery mistress asleep and insensible
to his kisses beneath her snowy mantle. The sunset
warmed back from its wintry purple to the golden tints
of heat, the stars burnt with a less vitreous sparkle,
the meteors slid once more lambently down the sky,
and the house-dove sat on the eaves, washing her
breast in the snow water, and thinking (like a neglected
wife at a capricious return of her truant's tenderness)
that the sunshine would last for ever!

The air was now full of music. The water
trickled away under the snow, and, as you looked
around and saw no change or motion in the white
carpet of the earth, it seemed as if a myriad of small
bells were ringing under ground—fairies, perhaps,
startled in mid-revel with the false alarm of summer,
and hurrying about with their silver anklets, to wake
up the slumbering flowers. The mountain torrents
were loosed, and rushed down upon the valleys like
the Children of the Mist; and the hoarse war-cry,
swelling and falling upon the wind, maintained its
perpetual undertone like an accompaniment of bassoons;
and occasionally, in a sudden lull of the breeze,
you would hear the click of the undermined snowdrifts
dropping upon the earth, as if the chorister of
Spring were beating time to the reviving anthem of
nature.

The snow sunk, perhaps a foot in a day, but it was

only perceptible to the eye where you could measure
its wet mark against a tree from which it had fallen
away, or by the rock, from which the dissolving bank
shrunk and separated, as if rocks and snow were as
heartless as ourselves, and threw off their friends, too,
in their extremity! The low-lying lake, meantime,
surrounded by melting mountains, received the abandoned
waters upon its frozen bosom, and, spreading
them into a placid and shallow lagoon, separate by a
crystal plane from its own lower depths, gave them
the repose denied in the more elevated sphere in
which lay their birthright. And thus—(oh, how full
is nature of these gentle moralities!)—and thus sometimes
do the lowly, whose bosom, like the frozen lake,
is at first cold and unsympathetic to the rich and noble,
still receive them in adversity, and, when neighbourhood
and dependence have convinced them that
they are made of the same common element, as the
lake melts its dividing and icy plane, and mingles the
strange waters with its own, do they dissolve the unnatural
barrier of prejudice and take the humbled
wanderer to their bosom!

The face of the snow lost its dazzling whiteness as
the thaw went on, as disease steals away the beauty
of those we love—but it was only in the distance,
where the sun threw a shadow into the irregular pits
of the dissolving surface. Near to the eye, (as the
dying one pressed to the bosom,) it was still of its
original beauty, unchanged and spotless. And now
you are tired of my loitering speculations, gentle
reader, and we will return (please Heaven, only on
paper!) to Edith Linsey.

The roads were at last reduced to what is expressively
called, in New-England, slosh, (in New-York
posh, but equally descriptive,) and Fred received a
hint from the Judge that the mail had arrived in the
usual time, and his beaux jours were at an end.

A slighter thing than my departure would have
been sufficient to stagger the tottering spirits of Edith.
We were sitting at table when the letters came in, and
the dates were announced that proved the opening of
the roads; and I scarce dared to turn my eyes upon
the pale face that I could just see had dropped upon
her bosom. The next instant there was a general
confusion, and she was carried lifeless to her chamber.

A note, scarce legible, was put into my hand in
the course of the evening, requesting me to sit up for
her in the library. She would come to me, she said,
if she had strength.

It was a night of extraordinary beauty. The full
moon was high in the heavens at midnight, and there
had been a slight shower soon after sunset, which,
with the clearing-up wind, had frozen thinly into a
most fragile rime, and glazed every thing open to the
sky with transparent crystal. The distant forest looked
serried with metallic trees, dazzlingly and unspeakably
gorgeous, and, as the night-wind stirred through them
and shook their crystal points in the moonlight—the
aggregated stars of heaven springing from their Maker's
hand to the spheres of their destiny, or the
march of the host of the archangel Michael with their
irradiate spear-points glittering in the air, or the diamond
beds of central earth thrust up to the sun in
some throe of the universe—would, each or all, have
been well bodied forth by such similitude.

It was an hour after midnight when Edith was supported
in by her maid, and, choosing her own position,
sunk into the broad window-seat, and lay with
her head on my bosom, and her face turned outward
to the glittering night. Her eyes had become, I
thought, unnaturally bright, and she spoke with an
exhausted faintness that gradually strengthened to a

tone of the most thrilling and melodious sweetness.
I shall never get that music out of my brain!

“Philip!” she said.

“I listen, dear Edith!”

“I am dying.”

And she looked it, and I believed her; and my
heart sunk to its deepest abyss of wretchedness with
the conviction.

She went on to talk of death. It was the subject
that pressed most upon her mind, and she could
scarce fail to be eloquent on any subject. She was
very eloquent on this. I was so impressed with the
manner in which she seemed almost to rhapsodize between
the periods of her faintness, as she lay in my
arms that night, that every word she uttered is still
fresh in my memory. She seemed to forget my presence,
and to commune with her own thoughts aloud.

“I recollect,” she said, “when I was strong and
well, (years ago, dear Philip!) I left my books on a
morning in May, and looking up to find the course of
the wind, started off alone for a walk into its very
eye. A moist steady breeze came from the southwest,
driving before it fragments of the dispersed
clouds. The air was elastic and clear—a freshness
that entered freely at every pore was coming up, mingled
with the profuse perfume of grass and flowers—
the colours of the new, tender foliage were particularly
soothing to an eye pained with close attention—
and the just perceptible murmur of the drops shaken
from the trees, and the peculiarly soft rustle of the wet
leaves, made as much music as an ear accustomed to
the silence of solitude could well relish. Altogether,
it was one of those rarely-tempered days when every
sense is satisfied, and the mind is content to lie still
with its common thoughts, and simply enjoy.

“I had proceeded perhaps a mile—my forehead

held up to the wind, my hair blowing back, and the
blood glowing in my cheeks with the most vivid flush
of exercise and health, when I saw coming towards
me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by illness
to the extremest emaciation. His lip was colourless,
his skin dry and white, and his sunken eyes had
that expression of inquiring earnestness which comes
always with impatient sickness. He raised his head,
and looked steadily at me as I came on. My lips were
open, and my whole air must have been that of a person
in the most exulting enjoyment of health. I was
just against him, gliding past with an elastic step,
when, with his eye still fixed on me, he half turned,
and in a voice of inexpressible meaning, exclaimed,
`Merciful heaven! how well she is!' I passed on,
with his voice still ringing in my ear. It haunted me
like a tone in the air. It was repeated in the echo of
my tread—in the panting of my heart. I felt it in the
beating of the strong pulse in my temples. As if it
was strange that I should be so well! I had never
before realized that it could be otherwise. It seemed
impossible to me that my strong limbs should fail me,
or the pure blood I felt bounding so bravely through
my veins could be reached and tainted by disease.
How should it come? If I ate, would it not nourish
me? If I slept, would it not refresh me? If I came
out in the cool, free air, would not my lungs heave,
and my muscles spring, and my face feel its grateful
freshness? I held out my arm, for the first time in my
life, with a doubt of its strength. I closed my hand
unconsciously, with a fear it would not obey. I drew
a deep breath, to feel if it was difficult to breathe; and
even my bounding step, that was as elastic then as a
fawn's, seemed to my excited imagination, already to
have become decrepit and feeble.

“I walked on, and thought of death. I had never

before done so definitely; it was like a terrible shape
that had always pursued me dimly, but which I had
never before turned and looked steadily on. Strange!
that we can live so constantly with that threatening
hand hung over us, and not think of it always! Strange!
that we can use a limb, or enter with interest into any
pursuit of time, when we know that our continued
life is almost a daily miracle!

“How difficult it is to realize death! How difficult
it is to believe that the hand with whose every vein
you are familiar, will ever lose its motion and its
warmth? That the quick eye, which is so restless
now, will settle and grow dull? That the refined lip,
which now shrinks so sensitively from defilement, will
not feel the earth lying upon it, and the tooth of the
feeding worm? That the free breath will be choked,
and the forehead be pressed heavily on by the decaying
coffin, and the light and air of heaven be shut quite
out; and this very body, warm, and breathing, and
active as it is now, will not feel uneasiness or pain?
I could not help looking at my frame as these thoughts
crowded on me; and I confess I almost doubted my
own convictions—there was so much strength and
quickness in it—my hand opened so freely, and my
nostrils expanded with such a satisfied thirst to the
moist air. Ah! it is hard to believe at first that we
must die! harder still to believe and realize the repulsive
circumstances that follow that terrible change!
It is a bitter thought at the lightest. There is little
comfort in knowing that the soul will not be there—
that the sense and the mind that feel and measure suffering,
will be gone. The separation is too great a
mystery to satisfy fear. It is the body that we know.
It is this material frame in which the affections have
grown up. The spirit is a mere thought —a presence
that we are told of, but do not see. Philosophize as

we will, the idea of existence is connected indissolubly
with the visible body, and its pleasant and familiar
senses. We talk of, and believe, the soul's ascent to
its Maker; but it is not ourselves—it is not our own
conscious breathing identity that we send up in imagination
through the invisible air. It is some phantom
that is to issue forth mysteriously, and leave us gazing
on it in wonder. We do not understand, we cannot
realize it.

“At the time I speak of, my health had been always
unbroken. Since then, I have known disease in many
forms, and have had, of course, more time and occasion
for the contemplation of death. I have never,
till late, known resignation. With my utmost energy
I was merely able, in other days, to look upon it with
quiet despair; as a terrible, unavoidable evil. I remember
once, after severe suffering for weeks, I overheard
the physician telling my mother that I must
die, and from that moment the thought never left me.
A thin line of light came in between the shutters of
the south window; and, with this one thought fastened
on my mind, like the vulture of Prometheus, I lay
and watched it, day after day, as it passed with its
imperceptible progress over the folds of my curtains.
The last faint gleam of sunset never faded from its
damask edge, without an inexpressible sinking of my
heart, and a belief that I should see its pleasant light
no more. I turned from the window when even imagination
could find the daylight no longer there, and
felt my pulse and lifted my head to try my remaining
strength. And then every object, yes, even the meanest,
grew unutterably dear to me; my pillow, and the
cup with which my lips were moistened, and the cooling
amber which I had held in my hand, and pressed
to my burning lips when the fever was on me—every

thing that was connected with life, and that would
remain among the living when I was gone.

“It is strange, but with all this clinging to the world
my affection for the living decreased sensibly. I grew
selfish in my weakness. I could not bear that they
should go from my chamber into the fresh air, and
have no fear of sickness and no pain. It seemed unfeeling
that they did not stay and breathe the close
atmosphere of my room—at least till I was dead.—
How could they walk round so carelessly, and look
on a fellow-creature dying helplessly and unwillingly,
and never shed a tear! And then the passing courtesies
exchanged with the family at the door, and the
quickened step on the sidewalk, and the wandering
looks about my room, even while I was answering
with my difficult breath their cold inquiries! There
was an inhuman carelessness in all this that stung me
to the soul.

“I craved sympathy as I did life; and yet I doubted
it all. There was not a word spoken by the friends
who were admitted to see me, that I did not ponder
over when they were gone, and always with an impatient
dissatisfaction. The tone, and the manner,
and the expression of face, all seemed forced; and
often, in my earlier sickness, when I had pondered for
hours on the expressed sympathy of some one I had
loved, the sense of utter helplessness which crowded
on me with my conviction of their insincerity, quite
overcame me. I have lain night after night, and
looked at my indifferent watchers: and oh how I
hated them for their careless ease, and their snatched
moments of repose! I could scarce keep from dashing
aside the cup they came to give me so sluggishly.

“It is singular that, with all our experience of sickness,
we do not attend more to these slight circumstances.
It can scarce be conceived how an ill-managed

light, or a suppressed whispering, or a careless
change of attitude in the presence of one whose senses
are so sharpened, and whose mind is so sensitive as a
sick person's, irritate and annoy. And, perhaps, more
than these to bear, is the affectedly subdued tone of
condolence. I remember nothing which I endured so
impatiently.

“Annoyances like these, however, scarcely diverted
for a moment the one great thought of death. It became
at last familiar, but, if possible, more dreadfully
horrible from that very fact. It was giving it a new
character. I realized it more. The minute circumstances
became nearer and more real—I tried the position
in which I should lie in my coffin—I lay with
my arms to my side, and my feet together, and with
the cold sweat standing in large drops on my lip, composed
my features into a forced expression of tranquillity.

“I awoke on the second morning after the hope of
my recovery had been abandoned. There was a narrow
sunbeam lying in a clear crimson line across the
curtain, and I lay and watched the specks of lint sailing
through it, like silver-winged insects, and the thin
dust, quivering and disappearing on its definite limit,
in a dream of wonder. I had thought not to see
another sun, and my mind was still fresh with the expectation
of an immediate change; I could not believe
that I was alive. The dizzy throb in my temples was
done; my limbs felt cool and refreshed; my mind had
that feeling of transparency which is common after
healthful and sweet sleep; and an indefinite sensation
of pleasure trembled in every nerve. I thought that
this might be death, and that, with this exquisite feeling
of repose, I was to linger thus consciously with
the body till the last day; and I dwelt on it pleasantly
with my delicious freedom from pain. I felt no regret

for life—none for a friend even: I was willing—quite
willing—to lie thus for ages. Presently the physician
entered; he came and laid his fingers on my pulse,
and his face brightened. `You will get well,' he said,
and I heard it almost without emotion. Gradually,
however, the love of life returned; and as I realized it
fully, and all the thousand chords which bound me to it
vibrated once more, the tears came thickly to my eyes,
and a crowd of delightful thoughts pressed cheerfully
and glowingly on me. No language can do justice
to the pleasure of convalescence from extreme sickness.
The first step upon the living grass—the first
breath of free air—the first unsuppressed salutation of
a friend—my fainting heart, dear Philip, rallies and
quickens even now with the recollection.”

I have thrown into a continuous strain what was
murmured to me between pauses of faintness, and with
difficulty of breath that seemed overpowered only by
the mastery of the eloquent spirit apparently trembling
on its departure. I believed Edith Linsey would die
that night: I believed myself listening to words spoken
almost from heaven; and if I have wearied you, dear
reader, with what must be more interesting to me than
to you, it is because every syllable was burnt like
enamel into my soul, in my boundless reverence and
love.

It was two o'clock, and she still lay breathing painfully
in my arms. I had thrown up the window, and
the soft south wind, stirring gently among the tinkling
icicles of the trees, came in, warm and genial, and she
leaned over to inhale it, as if it came from the Source
of life. The stars burned gloriously in the heavens;
and, in a respite of her pain, she lay back her head,
and gazed up at them with an inarticulate motion of
her lips, and eyes so unnaturally kindled, that I thought
reason had abandoned her.

“How beautiful are the stars to-night, Edith!” I
said, with half a fear that she would answer me in
madness.

“Yes,” she said, putting my hand (that pressed her
closer, involuntarily, to my bosom) first to her lips—
“Yes; and, beautiful as they are, they are all accurately
numbered and governed, and just as they burn
now have they burned since the creation, never `faint
in their watches,' and never absent from their place.
How glorious they are! How thrilling it is to see them
stand with such a constant silence in the sky, unsteadied
and unsupported, obeying the great law of their
Maker! What pure and silvery light it is! How
steadily it pours from those small fountains, giving
every spot of earth its due portion! The hovel and
the palace are shone upon equally, and the shepherd
gets as broad a beam as the king, and these few rays
that are now streaming into my feverish eyes were
meant and lavished only for me! I have often
thought—has it never occurred to you, dear Philip?—
how ungrateful we are to call ourselves poor, when
there is so much that no poverty can take away!
Clusters of silver rays from every star in these heavens
are mine. Every breeze that breaks on my forehead
was sent for my refreshment. Every tinkle and ray
from those stirring and glistening icicles, and the invigorating
freshness of this unseasonable and delicious
wind, and moonlight, and sunshine, and the glory of
the planets, are all gifts that poverty could not take
away! It is not often that I forget these treasures; for
I have loved nature, and the skies of night and day, in
all their changes, from my childhood, and they have
been unspeakably dear to me; for in them I see the
evidence of an Almighty Maker, and in the excessive
beauty of the stars and the unfading and equal splendour
of their steadfast fires, I see glimpses of an immortal

life, and find an answer to the eternal questioning
within me!

“Three! The village clock reaches us to-night.
Nay, the wind cannot harm me now. Turn me more
to the window, for I would look nearer upon the stars:
it is the last time—I am sure of it—the very last! Yet
to-morrow night those stars will all be there,—not one
missing from the sky, nor shining one ray the less because
I am dead! It is strange that this thought
should be so bitter,—strange that the companionship
should be so close between our earthly affections and
those spiritual worlds,—and stranger yet, that, satisfied
as we must be that we shall know them nearer
and better when released from our flesh, we still cling
so fondly to our earthly and imperfect vision. I feel,
Philip, that I shall traverse hereafter every star in those
bright heavens. If the course of that career of knowledge,
which I believe in my soul it will be the reward
of the blessed to run, be determined in any degree by
the strong desires that yearn so sickeningly within us,
I see the thousand gates of my future heaven shining
at this instant above me. There they are!—the clustering
Pleiades, with `their sweet influences;' and
the morning star, melting into the east with its transcendent
lambency and whiteness; and the broad galaxy,
with its myriads of bright spheres, dissolving into
each other's light, and belting the heavens like a girdle.
I shall see them all! I shall know them and
their inhabitants as the angels of God know them;
the mystery of their order, and the secret of their
wonderful harmony, and the duration of their appointed
courses,—all will be made clear!”

I have trespassed again, most indulgent reader, on
the limits of these Procrustean papers. I must defer
the “change” that “came o'er the spirit of my dream”
till another mood and time. Meanwhile, you may

consider Edith, if you like, the true heart she thought
herself (and I thought her) during her nine deaths in
the library; and you will have leisure to imagine the
three years over which we shall skip with this finale,
during which I made a journey to the North, and danced
out a winter in your own territories at Quebec—a circumstance
I allude to, no less to record the hospitalities
of the garrison of that time (this was in 27—were
you there?) than to pluck forth from Time's hindermost
wallet a modest copy of verses I addressed thence
to Edith. She sent them back to me considerably
mended; but I give you the original draught, scorning
her finger in my poesies.

3. PART III.
A DIGRESSION.

It was a September night at the University. On
the morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the
winner of the first honours of my year. I was the
envy—the admiration—in some degree the wonder,

of the collegiate town in which the University stands
for I had commenced my career as the idlest and
most riotous of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly
made me enamoured of my chambers and my
books—that had saddened my manners and softened
my voice—that had given me a disgust to champagne
and my old allies, in favour of cold water and the
Platonists—that, in short, had metamorphosed, as
Bob Wilding would have said, a gentleman-like rake
and vau-rien into so dull a thing as an exemplary
academician—was past the divining of most of my
acquaintances. Oh, once-loved Edith! hast thou
any inkling in thy downward metempsychosis of the
philosophy of this marvel?

If you were to set a poet to make a town, with carte
blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds, he
would probably turn out very much such a place as
New-Haven. (Supposing your education in geography
to have been neglected, dear reader, this is
the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half-metropolitan
town, lying between a precipice that
makes the fag-end of the Green Mountains and a
handsome bay in Long-Island Sound.) The first
thought of the inventor of New-Haven was to lay out
the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to
plant them from suburb to water-side with the magnificent
elms of the country. The result is, that at the
end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves. If it
were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying
over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would
never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a
glorious tree, the elm—and those of the place I speak
of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their
surprising size and beauty. With the curve of their
stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and
lower branches drop into the street, fanning your

face as you pass under with their geranium-like leaves;
and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a
vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden
flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a
bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty.
The houses are something between an Italian palace
and an English cottage—built of wood, but, in the
dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the
eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint; and
each stands in the midst of its own encircling grass-plot,
half buried in vines and flowers, and facing
outward from a cluster of gardens divided by slender
palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summerhouses
the square on whose limit it stands. Then,
like the vari-coloured parallelograms upon a chessboard,
green openings are left throughout the town,
fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the
long and weeping branches sweeping downward to
the grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping
moist and cool the road they overhang; and fair
forms (it is the garden of American beauty—New-Haven)
flit about in the green light in primitive security
and freedom, and you would think the place, if
you alit upon it in a summer's evening—what it seems
to me now in memory, and what I have made it in
this Rosa-Matilda description—a scene from Boccaccio,
or a vision from long-lost Arcady.

New-Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants.
Its steamers run to New-York in six hours (or did in
my time—I have ceased to be astonished on that subject,
and should not wonder if they did it now in one
—a trifle of seventy miles up the Sound,) and the
ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and
return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a
stroll in Broadway; and it is to this circumstance
that, while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very

metropolitan place in the character of its society.
The Amaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears
the fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd
has a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of
which is not yet suspected east of Bond-street; and, in
the newspaper hanging half out of the window, there
is news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from
Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of
the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault.
Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that
used to give every thing the go-by, has come to a
stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a proposition
in Congress ere long to do without him altogether—every
new thing “saves time” so marvellously.

Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater,
however, and gaily as I describe it, it is to me, if I may
so express it, a picture of memory glazed and put
away; if I see it ever again, it will be but to walk
through its embowered streets by a midnight moon.
It is vain and heart-breaking to go back, after absence,
to any spot of earth of which the interest was the human
love whose home and cradle it had been. But
there is a period in our lives when the heart fuses and
compounds with the things about it, and the close
enamel with which it overruns and binds in the affections,
and which hardens in the lapse of years till the
immortal germ within is not more durable and unwasting,
warms never again, nor softens; and there
is nothing on earth so mournful and unavailing as to
return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look
to return to ourselves and others as we were when we
thus knew them.

Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle
reader,) that it is others—not we—who are changed!
We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and

it is ever he who is cold and altered! We take the
hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in
boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted,
and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure and
her eyes, and not ours—oh, not ours!—that look back
the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid
and a gaze of stone! Oh God! it is ever he,—the
friend you have worshipped,—for whom you would
have died,—who gives you the tips of his fingers, and
greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would
rush into his bosom and break your heart with weeping
out the imprisoned tenderness of years! I could
carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with
a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and
worse than useless it is in this world of mocking
names! Yet “love” and “friendship” are words that
read well. You could scarce spare them in poetry.

2. II.

It was, as I have said, a moonlight night of unparalleled
splendor. The morrow was the college anniversary—the
day of the departure of the senior class,
—and the town, which is, as it were, a part of the University,
was in the usual tumult of the gayest and
saddest evening of the year. The night was warm,
and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are all
on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through
which a long hall stretches like a ball room, were
thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand
students of the University, and the crowds of their
friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place
at this season by the annual festivities, and the families,
every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves
on our trees, compared with those of old countries—
three to one,—so are our sons and daughters,) were all
sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strolling

together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gardens,
or looking out upon the street, returning the
greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered,
pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before
the door,—the whole scene one that the angels in heaven
might make a holiday to see.

There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors—young
men of from eighteen to twenty-four,—every one of
whom was passing the last evening of the four most
impressible and attaching years of his life, with the
family in which he had been most intimate, in a town
where refinement and education had done their utmost
upon the society, and which was renowned throughout
America for the extraordinary beauty of its women.
They had come from every state in the Union, and
the Georgian and the Vermontese, the Kentuckian and
the Virginian, were to start alike on the morrow-night
with a lengthening chain for home, each bearing away
the hearts he had attached to him, (one or more!) and
leaving his own, till, like the megnetized needle, it
should drop away with the weakened attraction; and
there was probably but one that night in the departing
troop who was not whispering in some throbbing
ear the passionate but vain and mocking avowal of
fidelity in love! And yet I had had my attachments
too;—and there was scarce a house in that leafy and
murmuring paradise of friendship and trees, that would
not have hailed me with acclamation had I entered
the door; and I make this record of kindness and hospitality,
(unforgotten after long years of vicissitude
and travel,) with the hope that there may yet live some
memory as constant as mine, and that some eye will
read it with a warmth in its lid, and some lip—some
one at least—murmur, “I remember him!” There
are trees in that town whose drooping leaves I could
press to my lips with an affection as passionate as if

they were human, though the lips and voices that have
endeared them to me are as changed as the foliage
upon the branch, and would recognise my love as
coldly.

There was one, I say, who walked the thronged
pavement alone that night, or but with such company
as Uhland's;[2] yet the heart of that solitary senior was
far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was
in his grasp,—the reward of daily self-denial and midnight
watching,—the prize of a straining mind and a
yearning desire;—and there was not one of the many
who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms,
either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its
attainment, who had the shadow of an idea what
spirit sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common
is this ignorance of human motives! How distant,
and slight, and unsuspected are the springs often of
the most desperate achievement! How little the world
knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the
politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life!
And how insignificant and unequal to the result would
seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back
from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty
they have waked and exhausted! It is a startling
thing to question even your own soul for its motive.
Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at
the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this
sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and,
as I live, the face that is conjured at my bidding is of
one of whom I have not had a definite thought for

years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant
I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she
will read this page with an interest no other could
awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have
come over me since we parted. I know, (and I knew
then, though we never exchanged a word save in
friendship,) that she devoted her innermost soul when
we strayed together by that wild river in the West,
(dost thou remember it, dear friend? for now I speak
to thee!) to the study of a mind and character of which
she thought better than the world or their possessor;
and I know—oh, how well I know!—that with husband
and children around her, whom she loves and
to whom she is devoted, the memory of me is laid
away in her heart like a fond but incomplete dream of
what once seemed possible,—the feeling with which
the mother looks on her witless boy and loves him
more for what he might have been, than his brothers
for what they are!

I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this
improvista digression, (for, like “Opportunity and the
Hours,” I “never look back;”[3] )—but let us return to
the shadow of the thousand elms of New-Haven.

The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning
superior to that of other countries, but I must run
the hazard of your incredulity as well, in preferring
an American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps,
(ragione—she was first worshipped there) Cytheris
shines as brightly; but the Ephesian of Connecticut
sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of the goddess,
as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye
lies close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible
beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is
less an emanation than a presence—the difference between
the water in a thunder shower and the depths

of the sea. The moon struggles to you in England—
she is all about you, like an element of the air, in
America.

The night was breathless, and the fragmented light
lay on the pavement in motionless stars, as clear and
definite in their edges as if the “patines of bright gold”
had dropped through the trees, and lay glittering beneath
my feet. There was a kind of darkness visible
in the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy
and leaf-burthened elms, and as I looked through the
houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens seemed
full of day-light—the unobstructed moon poured
with such a flood of radiance on the flowery alleys
within, and their gay troops of promenaders. And as
I distinguished one and another familiar friend, with
a form as familiar clinging to his side, and, with drooping
head and faltering step, listening or replying, (I
well knew,) to the avowals of love and truth, I murmured
in thought to my own far away, but never-forgotten
Edith, a vow as deep—ay, deeper than theirs,
as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the profounder
plummet of sorrow and separation. How the
very moonlight—how the stars of heaven—how the
balm in the air, and the languor of summer night in
my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneliness,
ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love!
Forsworn and treacherous Edith! do I live to write
this for thine eye?

I linger upon these trifles of the past—these hours
for which I would have borrowed wings when they
were here—and, as then they seemed but the flowering
promise of happiness, they seem now like the fruit,
enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there
would seem to be in the world—knows any one of
such a commodity in the present? I have not seen
it in my travels.

3. III.

I was strolling on through one of the most fashionable
and romantic streets (when did these two words
ever before find themselves in a sentence together?)
when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar,
lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a suspended
lamp, and crowded with company, attracted
my attention for a moment. Between the house and
the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a
white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion
to the low windows without concealing them from the
passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I
unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into
the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent
girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut
beauty—a singular instance in America of what is
called in England a fine woman. (With us that word
applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large
as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters
have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She
was a “book of beauty” printed with virgin type;
and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all
my life been trying to express—that some women
seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to
others who seem mortal réchauffes—as if every limb
and feature had been used, and got out of shape in
some other person's service. The lady I speak of
looked new—and her name was Isidora.

She was standing just under the lamp, with a single
rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb
of a classmate of mine with evident pleasure.
She was a great fool, (did I mention that before?)
but weak, and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she
was, Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor
Psyche (soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly

graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to
her as dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she
obeyed her instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly,
and without design, the loveliest thing in nature. I
do not see, for my part, why all women should not
be so. They are as useful as flowers; they perpetuate
our species.

I was looking at her with irresistible admiration,
when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree,
and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith, (of
whom I have before spoken in these historical papers,)
laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know, my dear Job,” I said, in a solemn
tone of admonition, “that blind John was imprisoned
for looking into people's windows?”

But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The
light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more
haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I
never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had
loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our
sight, since his first year in college; but that it would
ever so master him, or that he could link his monstrous
deformity, even in thought, with that radiant
vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as probable
as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere
the moon that kissed Endymion.

“I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever
since you left me,” said he. (We had parted three
hours before, at twilight.)

“And why not go in, in the name of common
sense?”

“Oh! God, Phil!—with this demon in my heart?
Can you see my face in this light?”

It was too true! he would have frightened the
household gods from their pedestals.

“But what would you do, my dear Job? Why

come here to madden yourself with a sight you must
have known you would see?”

“Phil?”

“What, my dear boy?”

“Will you do me a kindness?”

“Certainly.”

“Isidora would do any thing you wished her to do.”

“Um! with a reservation, my dear chum!”

“But she would give you the rose that is in her
hair.”

“Without a doubt.”

“And for me—if you told her it was for me.
Would she not?”

“Perhaps. But will that content you?”

“It will soften my despair. I will never look on
her face more; but I should like my last sight of her
to be associated with kindness?”

Poor Job! how true it is that “affection is a fire
which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak,
and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it
may best burn.” I do believe in my heart that the soul
in thee was designed for a presentable body—thy instincts
were so invariably mistaken. When didst
thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it
did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by
conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying similitude
it was that was written on every blank page in
thy Lexicon: “Larks that mount in the air, build
their nests below in the earth; and women that cast
their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon
vassals.” Appelles must have been better looking
than Alexander, when Campaspe said that!

As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to
break any three of the commandments in your service,
but you should hesitate to require of friendship a violation
of etiquette. I was in a round jacket and boots, and

it was a dress evening throughout New-Haven. I
looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me to
enter a soirée upon his errand, and passed my thumb
and finger around the edge of my white jacket; but I
loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for the
same reason, with a difference—the imperishable wellspring
he carried in his heart through the desert of the
world, and which I well knew he would give up his
life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal whose
construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably resembled.
When I hesitated, and looked down at my
boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse to
evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to
beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my
request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should
have had no difficulty; but it requires caution and
skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool.

“Would not the rose do as well,” said I, in desperate
embarrassment, “if she does not know that it is for
you, my dear Job?” It would have been very easy to
have asked for it for myself.

Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not
comprehend the pang my proposition gave him.

“Away prop, and down, scaffold,” thought I, as I
gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door.

“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.

“Mr. Slingsby?” inquired the mistress of the house,
seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the
hall.

“Mr. Slingsby!!!” cried out twenty voices in
amazement, as I stepped over the threshhold into the
light.

It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Khorat,
that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was
evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all
present. (I should observe, that in those days, I

relished rather of dandyism.) As I read the suspicion
in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went
straight up to Miss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her
to take a turn with me in the garden.

“Isidora,” I said, “I have long known your superiority
of mind,” (when you want any thing of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruyère,) “and I have great occasion to rely
on it in the request I am about to make of you.”

She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel-walk
with heightened majesty. I had not had occasion
to pay her a compliment before since my freshman
year.

“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”

“You know Smith—my chum.”

“Certainly.”

“I have just come from him.”

“Well!”

“He is gone mad!”

“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”

“Stark and furious!”

“Gracious goodness!”

“And all for you!”

“For me!!”

“For you!” I thought her great blue eyes would
have become what they call in America “sot,” at this
astounding communication.

“Now, Miss Higgins,” I continued, “pray listen;
my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular
strength, that seven men cannot hold him.”

“Gracious!”

“And he has broken away, and is here at your door.”

“Good gracious!”

“Don't be afraid! He is as gentle as a kitten when
I am present. And now hear my request.—He leaves
town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I

shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He is
bent upon one thing, and in that you must humour
him.”

Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.

“He has looked through the window and seen you
with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his
madness, of your love, he says, that if you would give
him that rose with a kind word, and a farewell, he
should be happy. You will do it, will you not?”

“Dear me! I should be so afraid to speak to him!”

“But will you? and I'll tell you what to say.”

Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and I passed
ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which,
with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded
like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her
in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and returned
to Job.

“You have come without it!” said the despairing
lover, falling back against the tree.

“Miss Higgins's compliments, and begs you will go
round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house.
She prefers to manage her own affairs.”

“Good God! are you mocking me?”

“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”

There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness
in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together,
whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in
the world, the most generous, the most diffident of itself,
yet the most self-sacrificing and delicate, was at
the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate
abandonment for a flower and a kind word; and she,
a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of
kindness of which she could not comprehend the meaning
or the worth, but which was to be garnered up by
that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid him
for years of unrequited affection! She recited it really

very well. I stood at the latticed door, and interrupted
them the instant there was a pause in the dialogue;
and getting Job away as fast as possible, I left Miss
Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and resumed my
midnight stroll.

Apropos—among Job's letters is a copy of verses
which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think
were written on this very occasion.

If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonous name, I
should have bought a criticism in some review, and
started him fairly as a poet. But “Job Smith!”—
“Poems by Job Smith!”—It would never do! If he
wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own
expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown
to each person that would take one away, the critics
would damn him all the same! Really one's father
and mother have a great deal to answer for!

But Job is a poet who should have lived in the
middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom
ne guerre, fashionable in those days, than because
his poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling
and courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule.
The philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day
stands an attack like a fortification, and comes down
upon the besieger with reason and logic as good as his
own. But the more delicate offspring of tenderness
and chivalry, intending no violence, and venturing
out to sea upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond
diving-bells by half a breath of scorn. I would
subscribe liberally myself to a private press and a
court of honour in poetry—critics, if admitted, to be
dumb upon a penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce
act upon this hint? Poets now-a-days are more
slaves and felons than your African, or your culprit
at the old Bailey!

I would go a great way, privately, to find a genuine
spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with
it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these
verses, which I copied long ago from a lady's album.
Yet, you may ridicule them if you like!

I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader;
for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was
worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is
a little touch of his quality:—

I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I
have no idea why I have digressed this time from the
story which (you may see by the motto at the beginning
of the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive
easily how people, who have nothing to do, betake
themselves to autobiography—it is so pleasant
rambling about over the past and regathering only
the flowers. Why should pain and mortification be

unsepultured? The world is no wiser for these written
experiences. “The best book,” said Southey,
“does but little good to the world, and much harm to
the author.” I shall deliberate whether to enlighten
the world as to Edith's metempsychosis, or no.

4. PART IV.
SCENERY AND A SCENE.

—Burton.

Job Smith and myself were on the return from Niagara.
It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of
June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon
its bosom for days;—the ragged trees upon its green
shore dropping their branches into the stirless water,
as if it were some rigid imitation—the lake glass, and
the leaves emerald;—the sky was of an April blue,
as if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till you
could see through its clarified depths to the gates of
heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the
face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in
the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass,
searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence.

No one can conceive who has not had his imagination
stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic solitudes
of the west, the vastness of the unbroken phases
of nature;—where every tree looks a king, and every
flower a marvel of glorious form and colour—where
the rocks are rent every one as by the “tenth” thunderbolt—and
lake, mountain or river, ravine or waterfall,
cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that feeds
the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have shaped
and left it—where the sculpture, and the painting, and
the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of Nature, go
on under the naked eye of the Almighty, and by His
own visible and uninterrupted hand, and where the
music of nature, from the anthem of the torrent and
storm, broken only by the scream of the vulture, to the

trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment of singing
birds and winds, is for ever ringing its changes, as if
for the stars to hear—in such scenes, I say, and in such
scenes only, is the imagination overtasked or stretched
to the capacity of a seraph's; and while common minds
sink beneath them to the mere inanition of their animal
senses, the loftier spirit takes their colour and stature,
and outgrows the common and pitiful standards of the
world. Cooper and Leatherstocking thus became what
they are—the one a high priest of imagination and poetry,
and the other a simple-hearted but mere creature
of instinct; and Cooper is no more a living man, liable
to the common laws of human nature, than Leatherstocking
a true and life-like transcript of the more
common effects of those overpowering solitudes on the
character.

We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job
and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with
the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and exclude
the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way.
He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could
argue without losing my temper; and the reason was,
that I always had the last word, and thought myself
victorious.

“We are about to return into the bosom of society,
my dear Job,” said I, looking, with unctuous good nature
on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the first
time in a month that morning. (It is an unsentimental
fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on the
most poetical spots of earth.)

“Yes,” said Job; “but how superior is the society
we leave behind! Niagara and Erie! What in your
crowded city is comparable to these?”

“Nothing, for size!—but for society—you will think
me a Pagan, dear chum,—but, on my honor, straight
from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearning
for the society of Miss Popkins!”

“Oh, Phil!”

“On my honour!”

“You, who were in such raptures at the Falls!”

“And real ones—but I wanted a woman at my elbow
to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have made up
my mind on a great principle since we have been on our
travels. Have you observed that I was pensive?”

“Not particularly—but what is your principle?”

“That a man is a much more interesting object
than a mountain.”

“A man! did you say?”

“Yes—but I meant a woman!”

“I don't think so.”

“I do!—and I judge by myself. When did I ever
see wonder of nature—tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid,
lake, or river,—that I would not rather have been
talking to a woman the while? Do you remember
the three days we were tramping through the forest
without seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless
aisle of a cathedral? Do you remember the long
morning when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara,
and it was a divine luxury only to breathe?
Do you remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on
Goat Island? Do you remember the ten thousand
glorious moments we have enjoyed between weather
and scenery since the bursting of these summer leaves?
Do you?”

“Certainly, my dear boy!”

“Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there
has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks,
that, if I could have distilled a charming girl out of a
mixture of you and any mountain, river or rock that
I have seen, I would not have flung you, without remorse,
into any witch's cauldron that was large enough,
and would boil at my bidding.”

“Monster!”

“And I believe I should have the same feelings in
Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures
with things you can neither eat nor make love to.”

“Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a
day?”

“An hour, perhaps, it might; for I should be studying,
in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure
of some living Musidora—but I should soon tire of it,
and long for my lunch or my love; and I give you
my honor I would not lose the three meals of a single
day to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

Job disdained to argue against such a want of sentimental
principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed
his eyes on the slowly gliding panorama of rock and
forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck.

Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more
striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three
hundred miles in the canal from lake Erie to the Hudson.
As I walked up and down the deck of the packet-boat,
I thought to myself, that if it were not for
thoughts of things that come more home to one's
“business and bosom,” (particularly “bosom,”) I could
be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and return
to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat
is a long and very pretty drawing room afloat. It has
a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian
blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible
motion. It is drawn generally by three horses
at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred
miles a day, as softly as if you were witch'd over the
ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company
(say fifty people) is such as pleases heaven; though I
must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting
the various dear friends I have made and left on that

long canal) there are few highways on which you will
meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers.
On this occasion my star was bankrupt—Job Smith
being my only civilized companion, and I was left to
the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the
scenery.

Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember,
through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown
manhood, every moment of that lonely evening.
I remember the progression of the sunset, from the
lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds,
to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star hung
over the wilderness. And I remember what I am
going to describe—a twilight anthem in the forest—
as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition in
the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer.
I thought time dragged heavily then, but I wish I had
as light a heart and could feel as vividly now!

The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles through
the heart of the primeval wilderness of America, and
the boat was gliding on silently and swiftly, and never
sailed a lost cloud through the abysses of space on a
course more apparently new and untrodden. The
luxuriant soil had sent up a rank grass that covered
the horse-path like velvet; the Erie water was clear
as a brook in the winding canal; the old shafts of the
gigantic forest spurred into the sky by thousands, and
the yet unseared eagle swung off from the dead branch
of the pine, and skimmed the tree-tops for another
perch, as if he had grown to believe that gliding spectre
a harmless phenomenon of nature. The horses drew
steadily and unheard at the end of the long line; the
steersman stood motionless at the tiller, and I lay on
a heap of baggage in the prow, attentive to the slightest
breathing of nature, but thinking, with an ache at
my heart, of Edith Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention

it?) I was hastening with a lover's proper impatience.
I might as well have taken another turn in
my “fool's paradise.”

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine
tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from
an Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted
the first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and
the screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced
without waiting to be importuned, though we were
listening for the nightingale. The air, as I said before,
had been all day breathless; but as the first
chill of evening displaced the warm atmosphere of
the departed sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored
bosom of the canal, and then commenced the night
anthem of the forest, audible, I would fain believe,
in its soothing changes, by the dead tribes whose
bones whiten amid the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly
yet articulately, the suspended and wavering
foliage of the birch was touched by the many-fingered
wind, and, like a faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves
rustled in the low branches; and, with a moment's
pause, when you could hear the moving of the vulture's
claws upon the bark, as he turned to get his
breast to the wind, the increasing breeze swept into
the pine-tops, and drew forth from their fringe-like
and myriad tassels a low monotone like the refrain of
a far-off dirge; and still as it murmured, (seeming to
you sometimes like the confused and heart-broken
responses of the penitents on a cathedral floor,) the
blast strengthened and filled, and the rigid leaves of
the oak, and the swaying fans and chalices of the magnolia,
and the rich cups of the tulip-trees, stirred and
answered with their different voices like many-toned
harps; and when the wind was fully abroad, and
every moving thing on the breast of the earth was
roused from its daylight repose, the irregular and

capricious blast, like a player on an organ of a thousand
stops, lulled and strengthened by turns, and
from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the whisper
of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging and groaning
branches of the larch and the fir, the anthem
went ceaselessly through its changes, and the harmony,
(though the owl broke in with his scream, and
though the over-blown monarch of the wood came
crashing to the earth,) was still perfect and without
a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature
out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes into
this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment of
bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or the
scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated
croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the outburst
of an octave flute above the even melody of an
orchestra; and it is surprising how the large raindrops,
pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of
the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself,
sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a
low burthen to the general anthem of the earth—as
it were, a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a “couchant ear” in
my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while
I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love
in the wilderness.

There will come sometimes in the spring—say in
May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies
are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine—
there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth-renewing
season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent
shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young
pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be
called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while
watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the
unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends

softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break
away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze.
The next morning you shall come out with me to a
hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with
your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every
four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a
pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp
by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at
ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and
yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy
pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through
the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla.
There is not much variety in its music, but it is a
pleasant montone for thought, and if you have a
restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned
to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart
and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may
lie down with a crooked root under your head in the
skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne
to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend,
or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no gratitude,
and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon
the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!—how
many that we hear, and how many that are “too
constant to be heard!” I could go back to my youth,
now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture
a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that
would bring the blush upon my cheek to think how
my senses are dulled since such things could give me
pleasure! Is there no “well of Kanathos” for renewing
the youth of the soul?—no St. Hilary's cradle?
no elixir to cast the slough of heart-sickening and
heart-tarnishing custom? Find me an alchymy for
that, with your alembic and crucible, and you may
resolve to dross again your philosopher's stone!

2. II.

Every body who makes the passage of the Erie
canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a
wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called
Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before
mentioning the Falls, however, to sing the praises of
Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants—having
received much hospitality from the worthy burghers,
and philandered up and down their well-flagged trottoir
very much to my private satisfaction. I should
scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to convince
me that the Erie water, which comes down the
canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through
the market-place of that pleasant town, has not communicated
to the hearts of its citizens the expansion
and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn.
I have a theory on that subject with which I intend
to surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer
draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one
tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose
like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in
vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied
their gaze—(that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of
melody and soul, alone recalls to me)—that these, and
the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius, that
were other gifts of the same marvel among women—
that these were born of common parentage, and nursed
by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were but the
kindest of friends, that bright creature and myself, and
I may say, without charging myself with the blindness
of love, that I believe in my heart she was the foster-child
of the water-spirits on whose wandering streamlet
she lived—that the thousand odors that swept down
from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and the unseen
but wild and innumerable influences of nature, or
whatever you call that which makes the Indian a believer

in the Great Spirit—that these came down with
those clear waters, ministering to the mind and watching
over the budding beauty of this noble and most
high-hearted woman! If you do not believe it, I should
like you to tell me how else such a creature was
“raised,” as they phrase it in Virginia. I shall hold
to my theory till you furnish me with a more reasonable.

We heard at the hotel that there were several large
parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of
our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of
Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's afternoon
as was ever promised in the Almanac. We drew
rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the
wild road more leisurely, Job's Green Mountain proportions
fitting to the saddle something in the manner
and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the
same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones
accommodating itself with singular facility to the
irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal beneath
him.

I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period
of my life that will be rather interesting in my biography,
(it is my intention to be famous enough to merit
that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends
to be noting my “little peculiarities,”) and with this
posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record,
that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith
Linsey—at this time the lady of my constant love—for
whose sake and at whose bidding I was just concluding
(with success I presumed) a probation of three
years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals,
and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I
had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly
hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mocking
paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rainbow

spans not the earth more perfectly than did the
love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and that
ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds—
but I am anticipating my story.

Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated
himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire attention
of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under
cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house
and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it
could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbourhood
of scenery, he was off till heaven knew when,
and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to
dine without him, you can imagine the necessity of
my hungry manœuvre.

We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we
had come to see; and as our host's eldest daughter
waited upon us, (recorded in Job's journal, in my possession
at this moment, as “the most comely and gracious
virgin” he had seen in his travels,) we felt
bound to adapt our conversation to the purity of her
mind, and discussed only the philosophical point,
whether the beauty of the stream could be tasted in
the flavour of the fish—Job for it, I against it. The
argument was only interrupted by the entrance of an
apple pudding, so hot that our tongues were fully occupied
in removing it from place to place as the mouth
felt its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country
of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as
Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the President's
wife, he requested permission to propose her
health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to
the moonlight.

3. III.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton
Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Pæstum,

by a wandering artist, when there was a town of
ten thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty-pole,
and forty churches within fourteen miles of it.
It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans,
that in the “hardness” of character of which travellers
complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for
scenery; and before the fact of its discovery had got
well into the “Cahawba Democrat” and “Go-the-whole-hog-Courier,”
there was a splendid wooden
hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French
cook, soda-water and olives, and a law was passed by
the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hanging-bird's
nest from the trees “frowning down the awful
abysm,” (so expressed in the regulation,) as a qualification
for membership. Thenceforward to the present
time it has been a place of fashionable resort during
the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in
which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun,
it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies
with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had
penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed
for tender feet as well—the soft floor of pine-tassels
spread under the grassless woods, being considered an
improvement upon Turkey carpets and green-sward.

Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely
know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature
which bears the name is a tremendous torrent,
whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into
the earth—a roaring and dashing stream, so far below
the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that
you would think, as you come suddenly upon the
edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some
inner world, (coiled within ours, as we in the outer
circle of the firmament,) and laid open by some
Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust
of this “shallow earth.” The idea is rather assisted if

you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a
party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth,
and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the
same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the
last fashions, and philandering upon your parlour
floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness.

They showed me at Eleusis the well by which
Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual
visit to the plains of Thessaly—but with the
genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl
as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared
axle of the earth in the bed of this American river,
and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière
of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my
Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the
earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton.
I confess I have had, since my first descent into
those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity
of the globe—how the deuse it can hold together with
such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery
that could be laid to the charge of the moon,
for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of
moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver.
It was a night in which to wish it might never be
day again,—a night to be enamoured of the stars, and
bid God bless them like human creatures on their
bright journey,—a night to love in, to dissolve in,—to
do every thing but what night is made for,—sleep!
Oh Heaven! when I think how precious is life in such
moments; how the aroma,—the celestial bloom and
flower of the soul,—the yearning and fast-perishing
enthusiasm of youth waste themselves in the solitude
of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air;
when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath

influences that could inspire me with the elevation of
a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that
could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity
of devotion,—when I think this, and feel this, and
so waste my existence in vain yearnings—I could extingush
the divine spark within me like a lamp on an
unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation
to the animals I walk among! And that is the
substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a
well-meant remark of his own, that “it was a pity
Edith Linsey was not there.” He took the clause
about the “animals” to himself, and I made an apology
for the same a year after. We sometimes give our
friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our
rhapsodies!

Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I
have haunted it by the week together for its mere
loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful
chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of
the thousand forms and shapes of running water that
I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking
roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like
a black rim on the enclosing precipices; the bed of
the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock,
and, with the tremendous descent of the stream,—
forming for miles one continuous succession of falls
and rapids,—the channel is worn into curves and cavities
which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable
brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of
half twilight below, with here and there a long beam
of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy
or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating
and changing echoes,—

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying
at every step with the varying phase of the current.
Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which
the river flies with a single and hurrying leap, (not a
drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) occur
frequently as you ascend; and it is from these
that the place takes its name. But the Falls, though
beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequalled
rapidity with which the waters come to the
leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering
down into the abysm from trees apparently painted
on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing
current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it,
you would think the vault of the stedfast heavens a
flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of
beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some
hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided
volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of
scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror
of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above,
there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the
water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the
rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a
cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole
mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a
flying fiend into hell, and, re-appearing like the angel
that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine
serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last
figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his
pocket, and had a natural redolence of “Paradise
Lost” in his conversation.)

Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink,)
I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of
the Elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised
in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible
when she borrows drapery of Water; and Fire is so

staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight;
but Water! soft, pure, graceful Water! there is no
shape into which you can throw her that she does not
seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing
of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant
as her own spray-pearls and emeralds;—Fire has
no rubies like what she steals from the sunset;—Air
has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing
drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to
Water!

Who is there that did not love some stream in his
youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past
there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood,
a spring or a rivulet woven through the darkened
and torn woof of first affections like a thread of
unchanged silver? How do you interpret the instinctive
yearning with which you search for the
river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature,—
the clinging unaware to the river's course when a
truant in the fields in June,—the dull void you find in
every landscape of which it is not the ornament and
the centre? For myself, I hold with the Greek:—
“Water is the first principle of all things: we were
made from it and we shall be resolved into it.”[4]

4. IV.

The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition.
Invention you do not need if you have experience;
for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these
days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your
mouth; and when you have once begun you can end
whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's
imagination: but the hinges of a story,—the turning
gracefully back from a digression, (it is easy to turn

into one,)—is the pas qui coûte. My education on
that point was neglected.

It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and
Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, “no mind
to sleep,” followed the fashion and the rest of the company
at the inn, and strolled down to see the Falls by
moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job
straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I
have described above as my favourite, and, after
watching it for a few minutes, we turned back to a
dark cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and
sat musing in silence.

Several parties had strolled past without seeing us
in our recess, when two female figures, with their
arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly
around the jutting rock below, and approached us,
eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to
the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us,
and turned to look back at the scene. As the head
nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to
my feet: it was Edith! In the same instant her
voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible
impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again
upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid
his hand on my arm.

“It was his favourite spot!” said Edith. (We had
been at Trenton together years before.) “I stood here
with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might
tell him what my hand hesitates to write.”

“Poor Philip!” said her companion, whom by the
voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings,
“I cannot conceive how you can resolve so coldly to
break his heart.”

I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listened.
Edith went on.

“Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I

loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to
die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never
thought to need, of the goods of this world, more
than a sick chamber and a nurse; and Phil. was kind-hearted
and devoted to me, and I lived at home.
But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious desires
have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself
admired by whom I will, and every day growing
more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and
love in a cottage, though very well for you if you
like it, would never do for me. I should like him
very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and
devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him
miserable, and so—I think I had better put him out
of misery at once—don't you think?

A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips;
but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's
voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudible
to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow
of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of
my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a
crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent,
but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with
Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own.

5. V.

I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at
Saratoga in July,—the last month of the probation by
which I had won a right to her love. I had not spoken
to her, or written, or seen her, (save, unknown to
her, in the moment I have described,) in the three
long years to which my constancy was devoted. I
had gained the usual meed of industry in my profession,
and was admitted to its practice. I was on the
threshhold of manhood; and she had promised, before
Heaven, here to give me heart and hand.

I had parted from her at twelve on that night three
years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her
side in the crowded ball-room of Saratoga.

“Good God! Mr. Slingsby!” she exclaimed as I
put out my hand.

“Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss
Linsey?” I asked, as she still looked with a wondering
gaze into my face, pressing my hand, however,
with real warmth, and evidently under the control,
for the moment, of the feelings with which we had
parted.

“Changed, indeed! Why, you have studied yourself
to a skeleton! My dear Philip, you are ill!”

I was,—but it was only for a moment. I asked her
hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit
and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but,
at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay; and
when every body had congratulated me, in her hearing,
on the school to which I had put my wits in my
long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery
looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow
and rallied my sinking heart.

The candles were burning low, and the ball was
nearly over, when I entered the room again, and requested
Edith to take a turn with me on the colonnade.
She at once assented, and I could feel by her
arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her
lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to
me what she little thought I could so well anticipate.

“My probation is over,” I said, breaking the silence
which she seemed willing to prolong, and which had
lasted till we had twice measured the long colonnade.

“It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we
parted.” She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as
if trying to work out another more prominent thought
in her mind.

“Do you find me changed?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes! very!”

“But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith!”

She turned to me as if to ask me to explain myself.

“Will you listen to me while I tell you how?”

“What can you mean? Certainly.”

“Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself
to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned
to love you, and when I promised to love you for
life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy.
I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your
living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I was
still a child and knew nothing of the world. I have
since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well say
at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will easily
divine my drift. You are poor, and I find myself, as
you have seen to-night, in a position which will enable
me to marry more to my advantage; and, with these
views, I am sure I should only make you miserable by
fulfilling my contract with you, and you will agree
with me that I consult our mutual happiness by this
course—don't you think?”

At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached
and made some sensible remarks about the weather;
and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's
arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her
to finish her promenade and swallow her own projected
speech and mine, and went to bed.

And so ended my first love!