University of Virginia Library

EDITH LINSEY.

1. PART I.
FROST AND FLIRTATION.

It began to snow. The air softened; the pattering
of the horse's 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 heartache, 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. Our 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 eyelids 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 eyelids 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 holydays,
had nursed 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 everything, Phil!”

“But a sweet voice?”

“Um! everybody 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 threshold, 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 labor
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
scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up—unwillingness
to stir, and inability to think of anything
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 afterward 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 parote, 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 boná
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 holydays. The second Saturday had
come round, and I just remember that Fred was very
much out of humor with me for having appeared to
his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and
nothing he had said I was. He had described me as
the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, 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
favorite 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 everything 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 favorite of favorites 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 Psyche 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

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
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-laborer. 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 favorite 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 color 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 unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author?
Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been
startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward,
that the broken spell was not to be rewound? 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 humor 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
blam—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 eyry.
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 de
lusion, 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 can not 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
Shakspere, 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 thummed 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 re-perusal.
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 look
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 shelf 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 can not, 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-humored 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. Shakspere
came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundredth
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
Shakspere. 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 Alfouse, 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 a while, 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 had 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 can not 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 without 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 an 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 color, 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 stepping-stone
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 everything;
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
anything 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 anything),
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
lifetime. 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 knew
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 you own—that, in conquering
a heart vanity is the first out-post—that while your 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 lit
tle 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 that
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 in
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 hers
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 everyday 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 develop 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 wherever 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 splendor 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 color 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 humor; 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 color 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 never. 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 humor
of men is too rude, and the secluded light subdaes
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 color gives everything a beautiful teint 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 dependant
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 furnimre.
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 indiciously. 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 colored 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 reaction 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 eti
quette 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 colored—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 lifetime; and even if they were, there is no one
taste which could always relish them. It is an humiliating
thought that immortal mind must be husbanded
like material treasure!

“There is a remark of Godwin, 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 can not 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 outweighs, 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 carcless 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 teints of heat, the stars burned 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 snow-drifts 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 overselves 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 neighborhood
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 bcaux 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 everything 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 colors 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 toward
me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by illness
to the extremest emaciation. His lip was colorless,
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
neating 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
life, 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 can not
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—everything
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
caerlessness 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, involuntary, 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 splendor
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 can not 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 spititual 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.

Boy.

Will you not sleep, sir?

Knight.

Boy.

Here, master!

knight.

Boy.

Are you well, Sir?

Knight.

Boy!
Love you the stars?

Boy.

Knight.

Boy.

“Sir Fabian,” an unpublished Poem.

It was a September night at the university. On the
morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the winner
of the first honors of my year. I was the envy—the
admiration—in some degree the wonder, of the col
legiate 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 enamored 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 favor 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 summer-houses
the square on whose limit it stands. Then,
like the vari-colored 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-Matida
description—a scene from Boccacio, 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
Armaryllis 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 everything 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 gayly 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 holyday 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 magnetized
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 up 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 daylight—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 might, 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 anything 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.” Apelles 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
well-spring 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 threshold 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 anything of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruvère), “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 gravelwalk
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 can not 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 humor
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' 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:—

Job had rejoiced in a more euphonious 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 de
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 honor
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 is 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 antobiography—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.

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 color—
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 ranging 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 color 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 effect 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 honor!”

“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 caldron 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 witched 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
abyss 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 unscared 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 monotone 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.

Everybody 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 the
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 neighbor
hood of scenery, he was off till Heaven knew when,
and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to
dine without him, you may 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 flavor
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 parlor 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 Endynion, 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 enamored 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 everything 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 extinguish
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 steadlast 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, reappearing 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 rivulent 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 favorite, 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 favorite 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 can not 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
threshold 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 ballroom 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 everybody 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!