By slow degrees, and not by violent spiritual
conflicts, he became a Protestant. He had but
passed from one chapel to another in the same
vast cathedral. He was still beneath the same
ample roof, still heard the same divine service
chanted in a different dialect of the same universal
language. Out of his old faith he brought with
him all he had found in it that was holy and pure
and of good report. Not its bigotry, and fanaticism,
and intolerance; but its zeal, its self-devotion,
its heavenly aspirations, its human sympathies,
its endless deeds of charity. Not till after
his father's death, however, did he become a
clergyman. Then his vocation was manifest to
him. He no longer hesitated, but entered upon
its many duties and responsibilities, its many
trials and discouragements, with the zeal of Peter
and the gentleness of John.

XIX.

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

A week later, and Kavanagh was installed in
his little room in the church-tower. A week
later, and the carrier-pigeon was on the wing.
A week later, and Martha Amelia's anonymous
epistolary eulogies of her relative had ceased
for ever.

Swiftly and silently the Summer advanced,
and the following announcement in the Fairmeadow
Advertiser proclaimed the hot weather
and its alleviations:—

“I have the pleasure of announcing to the
Ladies and Gentlemen of Fairmeadow and its
vicinity, that my Bath House is now completed,
and ready for the reception of those who are
disposed to regale themselves in a luxury peculiar
to the once polished Greek and noble Roman.

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

“To the Ladies I will say, that Tuesday of
each week will be appropriated to their exclusive
benefit; the white flag will be the signal;
and I assure the Ladies, that due respect shall
be scrupulously observed, and that they shall
be guarded from each vagrant foot and each
licentious eye.

Moreover, the village was enlivened by the
usual travelling shows,—the wax-work figures
representing Eliza Wharton and the Salem
Tragedy, to which clergymen and their families
were “respectfully invited, free on presenting
their cards”; a stuffed shark, that had eaten
the exhibitor's father in Lynn bay; the menagerie,
with its loud music and its roars of rage;
the circus, with its tan and tinsel,—its faded
columbine and melancholy clown; and, finally,
the standard drama, in which Elder Evans, like
an ancient Spanish Bululú, impersonated all the
principal male characters, and was particularly
imposing in Iago and the Moor, having half his
face lamp-blacked, and turning now the luminous,
now the eclipsed side to the audience, as the
exigencies of the dialogue demanded.

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

There was also a great Temperance Jubilee,
with a procession, in which was conspicuous a
large horse, whose shaven tail was adorned with
gay ribbons, and whose rider bore a banner with
the device, “Shaved in the Cause”! Moreover,
the Grand Junction Railroad was opened
through the town, running in one direction to the
city, and in the other into unknown northern
regions, stringing the white villages like pearls
upon its black thread. By this, the town lost
much of its rural quiet and seclusion. The inhabitants
became restless and ambitious. They
were in constant excitement and alarm, like
children in story-books hidden away somewhere
by an ogre, who visits them regularly every
day and night, and occasionally devours one of
them for a meal.

Nevertheless, most of the inhabitants considered
the railroad a great advantage to the
village. Several ladies were heard to say that
Fairmeadow had grown quite metropolitan; and
Mrs. Wilmerdings, who suffered under a chronic
suspension of the mental faculties, had a vague
notion, probably connected with the profession
of her son, that it was soon to become a sea-port.

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

In the fields and woods, meanwhile, there were
other signs and signals of the Summer. The
darkening foliage; the embrowning grain; the
golden dragon-fly haunting the blackberry-bushes;
the cawing crows, that looked down from the
mountain on the corn-field, and waited day after
day for the scarecrow to finish his work and
depart; and the smoke of far-off burning woods,
that pervaded the air and hung in purple haze
about the summits of the mountains,—these were
the avant-couriers and attendants of the hot
August.

Kavanagh had now completed the first great
cycle of parochial visits. He had seen the
Vaughans, the Archers, the Churchills, and also
the Hawkinses and the Wilmerdingses, and many
more. With Mr. Churchill he had become
intimate. They had many points of contact
and sympathy. They walked together on leisure
afternoons; they sat together through long Summer
evenings; they discoursed with friendly
zeal on various topics of literature, religion,
and morals.

Moreover, he worked assiduously at his sermons.
He preached the doctrines of Christ.
He preached holiness, self-denial, love; and his

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

hearers remarked that he almost invariably took
his texts from the Evangelists, as much as
possible from the words of Christ, and seldom
from Paul, or the Old Testament. He did not
so much denounce vice, as inculcate virtue;
he did not deny, but affirm; he did not lacerate
the hearts of his hearers with doubt and disbelief,
but consoled, and comforted, and healed
them with faith.

The only danger was that he might advance
too far, and leave his congregation behind him;
as a piping shepherd, who, charmed with his
own music, walks over the flowery mead, not
perceiving that his tardy flock is lingering far
behind, more intent upon cropping the thymy
food around them, than upon listening to the
celestial harmonies that are gradually dying away
in the distance.

His words were always kindly; he brought
no railing accusation against any man; he dealt
in no exaggerations nor over-statements. But
while he was gentle, he was firm. He did not
refrain from reprobating intemperance because
one of his deacons owned a distillery; nor war,
because another had a contract for supplying the
army with muskets; nor slavery, because one

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

of the great men of the village slammed his
pew-door, and left the church with a grand air,
as much as to say, that all that sort of thing
would not do, and the clergy had better confine
itself to abusing the sins of the Hindoos, and
let our domestic institutions alone.

In affairs ecclesiastical he had not suggested
many changes. One that he had much at heart
was, that the partition wall between parish and
church should be quietly taken down, so that all
should sit together at the Supper of the Lord.
He also desired that the organist should relinquish
the old and pernicious habit of preluding with
triumphal marches, and running his fingers at
random over the keys of his instrument, playing
scraps of secular music very slowly to make
them sacred, and substitute instead some of the
beautiful symphonies of Pergolesi, Palestrina, and
Sebastian Bach.

He held that sacred melodies were becoming
to sacred themes; and did not wish, that, in his
church, as in some of the French Canadian
churches, the holy profession of religion should
be sung to the air of “When one is dead 't is for
a long time,”—the commandments, aspirations for
heaven, and the necessity of thinking of one's

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

salvation, to “The Follies of Spain,” “Louisa was
sleeping in a grove,” or a grand “March of the
French Cavalry.”

The study in the tower was delightful. There
sat the young apostle, and meditated the great
design and purpose of his life, the removal of all
prejudice, and uncharitableness, and persecution,
and the union of all sects into one church universal.
Sects themselves he would not destroy,
but sectarianism; for sects were to him only as
separate converging roads, leading all to the
same celestial city of peace. As he sat alone,
and thought of these things, he heard the great
bell boom above him, and remembered the
ages when in all Christendom there was but one
Church; when bells were anointed, baptized, and
prayed for, that, wheresoever those holy bells
should sound, all deceits of Satan, all danger of
whirlwinds, thunders, lightnings, and tempests,
might be driven away,—that devotion might increase
in every Christian when he heard them,—
and that the Lord would sanctify them with his
Holy Spirit, and infuse into them the heavenly
dew of the Holy Ghost. He thought of the great
bell Guthlac, which an abbot of Croyland gave to
his monastery, and of the six others given by his

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

successor,—so musical, that, when they all rang
together, as Ingulphus affirms, there was no ringing
in England equal to it. As he listened, the bell
seemed to breathe upon the air such clangorous
sentences as,


“Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum,
Defunctos ploro, nimbum fugo, festaque honoro.”
Possibly, also, at times, it interrupted his studies
and meditations with other words than these.
Possibly it sang into his ears, as did the bells
of Varennes into the ears of Panurge,—“Marry
thee, marry thee, marry, marry; if thou shouldst
marry, marry, marry, thou shalt find good therein,
therein, therein, so marry, marry.”

From this tower of contemplation he looked
down with mingled emotions of joy and sorrow on
the toiling world below. The wide prospect
seemed to enlarge his sympathies and his charities;
and he often thought of the words of Plato:
“When we consider human life, we should view
as from a high tower all things terrestrial; such
as herds, armies, men employed in agriculture, in
marriages, divorces, births, deaths; the tumults
of courts of justice; desolate lands; various
barbarous nations; feasts, wailings, markets; a

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

medley of all things, in a system adorned by contrarieties.”

On the outside of the door Kavanagh had
written the vigorous line of Dante,

“Think that To-day shall never dawn again!”

Once, as he sat in this retreat near noon, enjoying
the silence, and the fresh air that visited him
through the oval windows, his attention was arrested
by a cloud of dust, rolling along the road, out
of which soon emerged a white horse, and then
a very singular, round-shouldered, old-fashioned
chaise, containing an elderly couple, both in

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

black. What particularly struck him was the
gait of the horse, who had a very disdainful
fling to his hind legs. The slow equipage passed,
and would have been for ever forgotten, had not
Kavanagh seen it again at sunset, stationary at
Mr. Churchill's door, towards which he was
directing his steps.

As he entered, he met Mr. Churchill, just
taking leave of an elderly lady and gentleman in
black, whom he recognized as the travellers in the
old chaise. Mr. Churchill looked a little flushed
and disturbed, and bade his guests farewell with
a constrained air. On seeing Kavanagh, he
saluted him, and called him by name; whereupon
the lady pursed up her mouth, and, after a quick
glance, turned away her face; and the gentleman
passed with a lofty look, in which curiosity,
reproof, and pious indignation were strangely
mingled. They got into the chaise, with some
such feelings as Noah and his wife may be supposed
to have had on entering the ark; the
whip descended upon the old horse with unusual
vigor, accompanied by a jerk of the reins that
caused him to say within himself, “What is the
matter now?” He then moved off at his usual
pace, and with that peculiar motion of the hind

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

legs which Kavanagh had perceived in the
morning.

Kavanagh found his friend not a little disturbed,
and evidently by the conversation of the departed
guests.

“That old gentleman,” said Mr. Churchill,
“is your predecessor, Mr. Pendexter. He
thinks we are in a bad way since he left us. He
considers your liberality as nothing better than
rank Arianism and infidelity. The fact is, the
old gentleman is a little soured; the vinous fermentation
in his veins is now over, and the
acetous has commenced.”

Kavanagh smiled, but made no answer.

“I, of course, defended you stoutly,” continued
Mr. Churchill; “but if he goes about the
village sowing such seed, there will be tares
growing with the wheat.”

“I have no fears,” said Kavanagh, very
quietly.

Mr. Churchill's apprehensions were not, however,
groundless; for in the course of the week it
came out that doubts, surmises, and suspicions of
Kavanagh's orthodoxy were springing up in many
weak but worthy minds. And it was ever after
observed, that, whenever that fatal, apocalyptic

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

white horse and antediluvian chaise appeared
in town, many parishioners were harassed with
doubts and perplexed with theological difficulties
and uncertainties.

Nevertheless, the main current of opinion was
with him; and the parish showed their grateful
acknowledgment of his zeal and sympathy, by
requesting him to sit for his portrait to a great
artist from the city, who was passing the Summer
months in the village for recreation, using his
pencil only on rarest occasions and as a particular
favor. To this martyrdom the meek Kavanagh
submitted without a murmur. During the progress
of this work of art, he was seldom left
alone; some one of his parishioners was there to
enliven him; and most frequently it was Miss
Martha Amelia Hawkins, who had become very
devout of late, being zealous in the Sunday
School, and requesting her relative not to walk
between churches any more. She took a very
lively interest in the portrait, and favored with
many suggestions the distinguished artist, who
found it difficult to obtain an expression which
would satisfy the parish, some wishing to have it
grave, if not severe, and others with “Mr. Kavanagh's
peculiar smile.” Kavanagh himself was

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

quite indifferent about the matter, and met his
fate with Christian fortitude, in a white cravat and
sacerdotal robes, with one hand hanging down
from the back of his chair, and the other holding
a large book with the fore-finger between its
leaves, reminding Mr. Churchill of Milo with his
fingers in the oak. The expression of the face
was exceedingly bland and resigned; perhaps a
little wanting in strength, but on the whole satisfactory
to the parish. So was the artist's price;
nay, it was even held by some persons to be
cheap, considering the quantity of back-ground he
had put in.

XX.

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

Meanwhile, things had gone on very quietly
and monotonously in Mr. Churchill's family.
Only one event, and that a mysterious one, had
disturbed its serenity. It was the sudden disappearance
of Lucy, the pretty orphan girl; and as
the booted centipede, who had so much excited
Mr. Churchill's curiosity, disappeared at the same
time, there was little doubt that they had gone
away together. But whither gone, and where-fore,
remained a mystery.

Mr. Churchill, also, had had his profile, and
those of his wife and children, taken, in a very
humble style, by Mr. Bantam, whose advertisement
he had noticed on his way to school nearly
a year before. His own was considered the best,
as a work of art. The face was cut out entirely;
the collar of the coat velvet; the shirt-collar

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

very high and white; and the top of his head
ornamented with a crest of hair turning up in
front, though his own turned down,—which
slight deviation from nature was explained and
justified by the painter as a license allowable
in art.

One evening, as he was sitting down to
begin for at least the hundredth time the great
Romance,—subject of so many resolves and so
much remorse, so often determined upon but
never begun,—a loud knock at the street-door,
which stood wide open, announced a visitor.
Unluckily, the study-door was likewise open;
and consequently, being in full view, he found
it impossible to refuse himself; nor, in fact,
would he have done so, had all the doors
been shut and bolted,—the art of refusing
one's self being at that time but imperfectly
understood in Fairmeadow. Accordingly, the
visitor was shown in.

He announced himself as Mr. Hathaway.
Passing through the village, he could not deny
himself the pleasure of calling on Mr. Churchill,
whom he knew by his writings in the periodicals,
though not personally. He wished, moreover, to
secure the coöperation of one already so

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

favorably known to the literary world, in a new Magazine
he was about to establish, in order to raise
the character of American literature, which, in
his opinion, the existing reviews and magazines
had entirely failed to accomplish. A daily increasing
want of something better was felt by the
public; and the time had come for the establishment
of such a periodical as he proposed. After
explaining in rather a florid and exuberant manner
his plan and prospects, he entered more at large
into the subject of American literature, which it
was his design to foster and patronize.

“I think, Mr. Churchill,” said he, “that we
want a national literature commensurate with
our mountains and rivers,—commensurate with
Niagara, and the Alleghanies, and the Great
Lakes!”

“Oh!”

“We want a national epic that shall correspond
to the size of the country; that shall be
to all other epics what Banvard's Panorama of
the Mississippi is to all other paintings,—the
largest in the world!”

“Ah!”

“We want a national drama in which scope
enough shall be given to our gigantic ideas, and

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

to the unparalleled activity and progress of our
people!”

“Of course.”

“In a word, we want a national literature
altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake
the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering
over the prairies!”

“Precisely,” interrupted Mr. Churchill; “but
excuse me!—are you not confounding things
that have no analogy? Great has a very different
meaning when applied to a river, and when
applied to a literature. Large and shallow may
perhaps be applied to both. Literature is rather
an image of the spiritual world, than of the physical,
is it not?—of the internal, rather than the
external. Mountains, lakes, and rivers are, after
all, only its scenery and decorations, not its substance
and essence. A man will not necessarily
be a great poet because he lives near a great
mountain. Nor, being a poet, will he necessarily
write better poems than another, because he lives
nearer Niagara.”

“But, Mr. Churchill, you do not certainly
mean to deny the influence of scenery on the
mind?”

“No, only to deny that it can create genius.

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

At best, it can only develop it. Switzerland has
produced no extraordinary poet; nor, as far as
I know, have the Andes, or the Himalaya mountains,
or the Mountains of the Moon in Africa.”

“But, at all events,” urged Mr. Hathaway,
“let us have our literature national. If it is not
national, it is nothing.”

“On the contrary, it may be a great deal.
Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but
universality is better. All that is best in the great
poets of all countries is not what is national in
them, but what is universal. Their roots are in
their native soil; but their branches wave in the
unpatriotic air, that speaks the same language unto
all men, and their leaves shine with the illimitable
light that pervades all lands. Let us throw all
the windows open; let us admit the light and air
on all sides; that we may look towards the four
corners of the heavens, and not always in the
same direction.”

“But you admit nationality to be a good
thing?”

“Yes, if not carried too far; still, I confess, it
rather limits one's views of truth. I prefer what
is natural. Mere nationality is often ridiculous.
Every one smiles when he hears the Icelandic

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

proverb, `Iceland is the best land the sun shines
upon.' Let us be natural, and we shall be national
enough. Besides, our literature can be strictly
national only so far as our character and modes
of thought differ from those of other nations.
Now, as we are very like the English,—are, in
fact, English under a different sky,—I do not see
how our literature can be very different from
theirs. Westward from hand to hand we pass
the lighted torch, but it was lighted at the old
domestic fireside of England.”

“Then you think our literature is never to be
any thing but an imitation of the English?”

“Not at all. It is not an imitation, but, as
some one has said, a continuation.”

“It seems to me that you take a very narrow
view of the subject.”

“On the contrary, a very broad one. No
literature is complete until the language in which
it is written is dead. We may well be proud of
our task and of our position. Let us see if we
can build in any way worthy of our forefathers.”

“But I insist upon originality.”

“Yes; but without spasms and convulsions.
Authors must not, like Chinese soldiers, expect
to win victories by turning somersets in the air.”

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

“Well, really, the prospect from your point
of view is not very brilliant. Pray, what do you
think of our national literature?”

“Simply, that a national literature is not the
growth of a day. Centuries must contribute their
dew and sunshine to it. Our own is growing
slowly but surely, striking its roots downward,
and its branches upward, as is natural; and I do
not wish, for the sake of what some people call
originality, to invert it, and try to make it grow
with its roots in the air. And as for having it so
savage and wild as you want it, I have only to
say, that all literature, as well as all art, is the
result of culture and intellectual refinement.”

“Ah! we do not want art and refinement; we
want genius,—untutored, wild, original, free.”

“But, if this genius is to find any expression,
it must employ art; for art is the external expression
of our thoughts. Many have genius, but,
wanting art, are for ever dumb. The two must
go together to form the great poet, painter, or
sculptor.”

“In that sense, very well.”

“I was about to say also that I thought our
literature would finally not be wanting in a kind
of universality.

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

“As the blood of all nations is mingling with
our own, so will their thoughts and feelings
finally mingle in our literature. We shall draw
from the Germans tenderness; from the Spaniards,
passion; from the French, vivacity, to
mingle more and more with our English solid
sense. And this will give us universality, so
much to be desired.”

“If that is your way of thinking,” interrupted
the visitor, “you will like the work I am now
engaged upon.”

“What is it?”

“A great national drama, the scene of which
is laid in New Mexico. It is entitled Don
Serafin, or the Marquis of the Seven Churches.
The principal characters are Don Serafin, an
old Spanish hidalgo; his daughter Deseada; and
Fra Serapion, the Curate. The play opens
with Fra Serapion at breakfast; on the table a
game-cock, tied by the leg, sharing his master's
meal. Then follows a scene at the cock-pit,
where the Marquis stakes the remnant of his
fortune—his herds and hacienda—on a favorite
cock, and loses.”

“But what do you know about cock-fighting?”

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

demanded, rather than asked, the astonished and
half-laughing school-master.

“I am not very well informed on that subject,
and I was going to ask you if you could not
recommend some work.”

“The only work I am acquainted with,” replied
Mr. Churchill, “is the Reverend Mr.
Pegge's Essay on Cock-fighting among the Ancients;
and I hardly see how you could apply
that to the Mexicans.”

“Why, they are a kind of ancients, you
know. I certainly will hunt up the essay you
mention, and see what I can do with it.”

“And all I know about the matter itself,”
continued Mr. Churchill, “is, that Mark Antony
was a patron of the pit, and that his cocks
were always beaten by Cæsar's; and that, when
Themistocles the Athenian general was marching
against the Persians, he halted his army to
see a cock-fight, and made a speech to his soldiery,
to the effect, that those animals fought not
for the gods of their country, nor for the monuments
of their ancestors, nor for glory, nor for
freedom, nor for their children, but only for
the sake of victory. On his return to Athens,

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

he established cock-fights in that capital. But
how this is to help you in Mexico I do not
see, unless you introduce Santa Anna, and
compare him to Cæsar and Themistocles.”

“That is it; I will do so. It will give
historic interest to the play. I thank you for
the suggestion.”

“The subject is certainly very original; but
it does not strike me as particularly national.”

“Prospective, you see!” said Mr. Hathaway,
with a penetrating look.

“Ah, yes; I perceive you fish with a heavy
sinker,—down, far down in the future,—among
posterity, as it were.”

“You have seized the idea. Besides, I obviate
your objection, by introducing an American
circus company from the United States, which
enables me to bring horses on the stage and
produce great scenic effect.”

“That is a bold design. The critics will
be out upon you without fail.”

“Never fear that. I know the critics root
and branch,—out and out,—have summered
them and wintered them,—in fact, am one of
them myself. Very good fellows are the critics;
are they not?”

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

“O, yes; only they have such a pleasant
way of talking down upon authors.”

“If they did not talk down upon them, they
would show no superiority; and, of course, that
would never do.”

“Nor is it to be wondered at, that authors
are sometimes a little irritable. I often recall
the poet in the Spanish fable, whose manuscripts
were devoured by mice, till at length
he put some corrosive sublimate into his ink,
and was never troubled again.”

“Why don't you try it yourself?” said Mr.
Hathaway, rather sharply.

“O,” answered Mr. Churchill, with a smile
of humility, “I and my writings are too insignificant.
They may gnaw and welcome. I
do not like to have poison about, even for such
purposes.”

“By the way, Mr. Churchill,” said the visitor,
adroitly changing the subject, “do you know
Honeywell?”

“No, I do not. Who is he?”

“Honeywell the poet, I mean.”

“No, I never even heard of him. There
are so many poets now-a-days!”

“That is very strange indeed! Why, I

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

consider Honeywell one of the finest writers in
the country,—quite in the front rank of American
authors. He is a real poet, and no mistake.
Nature made him with her shirt-sleeves rolled
up.”

“What has he published?”

“He has not published any thing yet, except
in the newspapers. But, this Autumn, he is
going to bring out a volume of poems. I could
not help having my joke with him about it. I
told him he had better print it on cartridge-paper.”

“Why so?”

“Why, to make it go off better; don't you
understand?”

“O, yes; now that you explain it. Very
good.”

“Honeywell is going to write for the Magazine;
he is to furnish a poem for every number;
and as he succeeds equally well in the plaintive
and didactic style of Wordsworth, and the more
vehement and impassioned style of Byron, I
think we shall do very well.”

“And what do you mean to call the new
Magazine?” inquired Mr. Churchill.

“We think of calling it The Niagara.”

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

“Why, that is the name of our fire-engine!
Why not call it The Extinguisher?”

“That is also a good name; but I prefer
The Niagara, as more national. And I hope,
Mr. Churchill, you will let us count upon you.
We should like to have an article from your
pen for every number.”

“Do you mean to pay your contributors?”

“Not the first year, I am sorry to say. But
after that, if the work succeeds, we shall pay
handsomely. And, of course, it will succeed,
for we mean it shall; and we never say fail.
There is no such word in our dictionary. Before
the year is out, we mean to print fifty
thousand copies; and fifty thousand copies will
give us, at least, one hundred and fifty thousand
readers; and, with such an audience, any author
might be satisfied.”

He had touched at length the right strings in
Mr. Churchill's bosom; and they vibrated to
the touch with pleasant harmonies. Literary
vanity!—literary ambition! The editor perceived
it; and so cunningly did he play upon
these chords, that, before he departed, Mr.
Churchill had promised to write for him a series
of papers on Obscure Martyrs,—a kind of

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

tragic history of the unrecorded and life-long
sufferings of women, which hitherto had found
no historian, save now and then a novelist.

Notwithstanding the certainty of success,—
notwithstanding the fifty thousand subscribers and
the one hundred and fifty thousand readers,—
the Magazine never went into operation. Still
the dream was enough to occupy Mr. Churchill's
thoughts, and to withdraw them entirely from his
Romance for many weeks together.

XXI.

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

Every state, and almost every county, of
New England, has its Roaring Brook,—a mountain
streamlet, overhung by woods, impeded by
a mill, encumbered by fallen trees, but ever
racing, rushing, roaring down through gurgling
gullies, and filling the forest with its delicious
sound and freshness; the drinking-place of home-returning
herds; the mysterious haunt of squirrels
and blue-jays; the sylvan retreat of schoolgirls,
who frequent it on Summer holidays, and
mingle their restless thoughts, their overflowing
fancies, their fair imaginings, with its restless,
exuberant, and rejoicing stream.

Fairmeadow had no Roaring Brook. As its
name indicates, it was too level a land for that.
But the neighbouring town of Westwood, lying
more inland, and among the hills, had one of the

[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]

fairest and fullest of all the brooks that roar.
It was the boast of the neighbourhood. Not
to have seen it, was to have seen no brook,
no waterfall, no mountain ravine. And, consequently,
to behold it and admire, was Kavanagh
taken by Mr. Churchill as soon as the Summer
vacation gave leisure and opportunity. The
party consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Churchill, and
Alfred, in a one-horse chaise; and Cecilia,
Alice, and Kavanagh, in a carryall,—the fourth
seat in which was occupied by a large basket,
containing what the Squire of the Grove, in Don
Quixote, called his “fiambreras,”—that magniloquent
Castilian word for cold collation. Over
warm uplands, smelling of clover and mint;
through cool glades, still wet with the rain of
yesterday; along the river; across the rattling
and tilting planks of wooden bridges; by orchards;
by the gates of fields, with the tall
mullen growing at the bars; by stone walls overrun
with privet and barberries; in sun and heat,
in shadow and coolness,—forward drove the
happy party on that pleasant Summer morning.

At length they reached the Roaring Brook.
From a gorge in the mountains, through a long,
winding gallery of birch, and beech, and pine,

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

leaped the bright, brown waters of the jubilant
streamlet; out of the woods, across the plain,
under the rude bridge of logs, into the woods
again,—a day between two nights. With it
went a song that made the heart sing likewise;
a song of joy, and exultation, and freedom; a
continuous and unbroken song of life, and pleasure,
and perpetual youth. Like the old Icelandic
Scald, the streamlet seemed to say,—

“I am possessed of songs such as neither
the spouse of a king, nor any son of man, can
repeat: one of them is called the Helper; it
will help thee at thy need, in sickness, grief, and
all adversity.”

The little party left their carriages at a farm-house
by the bridge, and followed the rough road
on foot along the brook; now close upon it,
now shut out by intervening trees. Mr. Churchill,
bearing the basket on his arm, walked in front
with his wife and Alfred. Kavanagh came behind
with Cecilia and Alice. The music of the
brook silenced all conversation; only occasional
exclamations of delight were uttered,—the irrepressible
applause of fresh and sensitive natures,
in a scene so lovely. Presently, turning off
from the road, which led directly to the mill,

[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

and was rough with the tracks of heavy wheels,
they went down to the margin of the brook.

“How indescribably beautiful this brown water
is!” exclaimed Kavanagh. “It is like wine, or
the nectar of the gods of Olympus; as if the
falling Hebe had poured it from the goblet.”

“More like the mead or metheglin of the
northern gods,” said Mr. Churchill, “spilled
from the drinking-horns of Valhalla.”

But all the ladies thought Kavanagh's comparison
the better of the two, and in fact the best that
could be made; and Mr. Churchill was obliged to
retract and apologize for his allusion to the celestial
ale-house of Odin.

Ere long they were forced to cross the brook,
stepping from stone to stone, over the little rapids
and cascades. All crossed lightly, easily, safely;
even “the sumpter mule,” as Mr. Churchill
called himself, on account of the pannier. Only
Cecilia lingered behind, as if afraid to cross.
Cecilia, who had crossed at that same place a
hundred times before,—Cecilia, who had the
surest foot, and the firmest nerves, of all the village
maidens,—she now stood irresolute, seized
with a sudden tremor; blushing, and laughing at
her own timidity, and yet unable to advance.

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

Kavanagh saw her embarrassment, and hastened
back to help her. Her hand trembled in his;
she thanked him with a gentle look and word.
His whole soul was softened within him. His
attitude, his countenance, his voice, were alike
submissive and subdued. He was as one penetrated
with tenderest emotions.

It is difficult to know at what moment love
begins; it is less difficult to know that it has
begun. A thousand heralds proclaim it to the
listening air; a thousand ministers and messengers
betray it to the eye. Tone, act, attitude
and look,—the signals upon the countenance,—
the electric telegraph of touch;—all these betray
the yielding citadel before the word itself is
uttered, which, like the key surrendered, opens
every avenue and gate of entrance, and makes
retreat impossible!

The day passed delightfully with all. They
sat upon the stones and the roots of trees. Cecilia
read, from a volume she had brought with
her, poems that rhymed with the running water.
The others listened and commented. Little
Alfred waded in the stream, with his bare white
feet, and launched boats over the falls. Noon
had been fixed upon for dining; but they

[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]

anticipated it by at least an hour. The great basket
was opened; endless sandwiches were drawn
forth, and a cold pastry, as large as that of the
Squire of the Grove. During the repast, Mr.
Churchill slipped into the brook, while in the act
of handing a sandwich to his wife, which caused
unbounded mirth; and Kavanagh sat down on a
mossy trunk, that gave way beneath him, and
crumbled into powder. This, also, was received
with great merriment.

After dinner, they ascended the brook still
farther,—indeed, quite to the mill, which was not
going. It had been stopped in the midst of its
work. The saw still held its hungry teeth fixed
in the heart of a pine. Mr. Churchill took occasion
to make known to the company his long
cherished purpose of writing a poem called “The
Song of the Saw-Mill,” and enlarged on the
beautiful associations of flood and forest connected
with the theme. He delighted himself and
his audience with the fine fancies he meant to
weave into his poem, and wondered nobody had
thought of the subject before. Kavanagh said it
had been thought of before; and cited Kerner's
little poem, so charmingly translated by Bryant.
Mr. Churchill had not seen it. Kavanagh looked

[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]

into his pocket-book for it, but it was not to be
found; still he was sure that there was such
a poem. Mr. Churchill abandoned his design.
He had spoken,—and the treasure, just as he
touched it with his hand, was gone forever.

The party returned home as it came, all tired
and happy, excepting little Alfred, who was
tired and cross, and sat sleepy and sagging on his
father's knee, with his hat cocked rather fiercely
over his eyes.

XXII.

[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]

The brown Autumn came. Out of doors, it
brought to the fields the prodigality of the yellow
harvest,—to the forest, revelations of light,—
and to the sky, the sharp air, the morning mist,
the red clouds at evening. Within doors, the
sense of seclusion, the stillness of closed and
curtained windows, musings by the fireside, books,
friends, conversation, and the long, meditative
evenings. To the farmer, it brought surcease of
toil,—to the scholar, that sweet delirium of the
brain which changes toil to pleasure. It brought
the wild duck back to the reedy marshes of the
south; it brought the wild song back to the
fervid brain of the poet. Without, the village
street was paved with gold; the river ran red
with the reflection of the leaves. Within, the
faces of friends brightened the gloomy walls; the

[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]

returning footsteps of the long-absent gladdened
the threshold; and all the sweet amenities of
social life again resumed their interrupted reign.

Kavanagh preached a sermon on the coming
of Autumn. He chose his text from Isaiah,—
“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with
dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious
in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of
his strength? Wherefore art thou red in thine
apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth
in the wine-vat?”

To Mr. Churchill, this beloved season—this
Joseph with his coat of many colors, as he was
fond of calling it—brought an unexpected guest,
the forlorn, forsaken Lucy. The surmises of the
family were too true. She had wandered away
with the Briareus of boots. She returned alone,
in destitution and despair; and often, in the grief
of a broken heart and a bewildered brain, was
heard to say,—

“O, how I wish I were a Christian! If I
were only a Christian, I would not live any
longer; I would kill myself! I am too wretched!”

A few days afterwards, a gloomy-looking man
rode through the town on horseback, stopping at

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

every corner, and crying into every street, with a
loud and solemn voice,—

“Prepare! prepare! prepare to meet the
living God!”

It was one of that fanatical sect, who believed
the end of the world was imminent, and had prepared
their ascension robes to be lifted up in
clouds of glory, while the worn-out, weary world
was to burn with fire beneath them, and a new
and fairer earth to be prepared for their inheritance.
The appearance of this forerunner of the
end of the world was followed by numerous
camp-meetings, held in the woods near the village,
to whose white tents and leafy chapels many
went for consolation and found despair.

XXIII.

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

Again the two crumbly old women sat and
talked together in the little parlour of the gloomy
house under the poplars, and the two girls sat
above, holding each other by the hand, thoughtful,
and speaking only at intervals.

Alice was unusually sad and silent. The
mists were already gathering over her vision,—
those mists that were to deepen and darken as the
season advanced, until the external world should
be shrouded and finally shut from her view. Already
the landscape began to wear a pale and
sickly hue, as if the sun were withdrawing
farther and farther, and were soon wholly to
disappear, as in a northern winter. But to
brighten this northern winter there now arose
within her a soft, auroral light. Yes, the auroral
light of love, blushing through the whole heaven

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

of her thoughts. She had not breathed that
word to herself, nor did she recognize any thrill
of passion in the new emotion she experienced.
But love it was; and it lifted her soul into a
region, which she at once felt was native to it,—
into a subtler ether, which seemed its natural
element.

This feeling, however, was not all exhilaration.
It brought with it its own peculiar languor and
sadness, its fluctuations and swift vicissitudes of
excitement and depression. To this the trivial
circumstances of life contributed. Kavanagh had
met her in the street, and had passed her without
recognition; and, in the bitterness of the
moment, she forgot that she wore a thick veil,
which entirely concealed her face. At an evening
party at Mr. Churchill's, by a kind of fatality,
Kavanagh had stood very near her for a long
time, but with his back turned, conversing with
Miss Hawkins, from whose toils he was, in fact,
though vainly, struggling to extricate himself;
and, in the irritation of supposed neglect, Alice
had said to herself,—

“This is the kind of woman which most
fascinates men!”

But these cruel moments of pain were few

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

and short, while those of delight were many and
lasting. In a life so lonely, and with so little
to enliven and embellish it as hers, the guest in
disguise was welcomed with ardor, and entertained
without fear or suspicion. Had he been
feared or suspected, he would have been no
longer dangerous. He came as friendship, where
friendship was most needed; he came as devotion,
where her holy ministrations were always
welcome.

Somewhat differently had the same passion
come to the heart of Cecilia; for as the heart is,
so is love to the heart. It partakes of its strength
or weakness, its health or disease. In Cecilia,
it but heightened the keen sensation of life.
To all eyes, she became more beautiful, more
radiant, more lovely, though they knew not why.
When she and Kavanagh first met, it was hardly
as strangers meet, but rather as friends long
separated. When they first spoke to each other,
it seemed but as the renewal of some previous
interrupted conversation. Their souls flowed
together at once, without turbulence or agitation,
like waters on the same level. As they found
each other without seeking, so their intercourse
was without affectation and without embarrassment.

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

Thus, while Alice, unconsciously to herself,
desired the love of Kavanagh, Cecilia, as unconsciously,
assumed it as already her own.
Alice keenly felt her own unworthiness; Cecilia
made no comparison of merit. When Kavanagh
was present, Alice was happy, but embarrassed;
Cecilia, joyous and natural. The
former feared she might displease; the latter
divined from the first that she already pleased.
In both, this was the intuition of the heart.

So sat the friends together, as they had done
so many times before. But now, for the first
time, each cherished a secret, which she did not
confide to the other. Daily, for many weeks, the
feathered courier had come and gone from window
to window, but this secret had never been
intrusted to his keeping. Almost daily the
friends had met and talked together, but this
secret had not been told. That could not be
confided to another, which had not been confided
to themselves; that could not be fashioned into
words, which was not yet fashioned into thoughts,
but was still floating, vague and formless, through
the mind. Nay, had it been stated in words,
each, perhaps, would have denied it. The
distinct apparition of this fair spirit, in a visible

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

form, would have startled them; though, while
it haunted all the chambers of their souls as an
invisible presence, it gave them only solace and
delight.

“How very feverish your hand is, dearest!”
said Cecilia. “What is the matter? Are you
unwell?”

“Those are the very words my mother said
to me this morning,” replied Alice. “I feel
rather languid and tired, that is all. I could not
sleep last night; I never can, when it rains.”

“Did it rain last night? I did not hear it.”

“Yes; about midnight, quite hard. I listened
to it for hours. I love to lie awake, and hear the
drops fall on the roof, and on the leaves. It
throws me into a delicious, dreamy state, which
I like much better than sleep.”

Cecilia looked tenderly at her pale face. Her
eyes were very bright, and on each cheek was
a crimson signal, the sight of which would have
given her mother so much anguish, that, perhaps,
it was better for her to be blind than to see.

“When you enter the land of dreams, Alice,
you come into my peculiar realm. I am the
queen of that country, you know. But, of late,
I have thought of resigning my throne. These

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

endless reveries are really a great waste of time
and strength.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes; and Mr. Kavanagh thinks so, too.
We talked about it the other evening; and afterwards,
upon reflection, I thought he was right.”

And the friends resolved, half in jest and half
in earnest, that, from that day forth, the gate of
their day-dreams should be closed. And closed
it was, ere long;—for one, by the Angel of
Life; for the other, by the Angel of Death!

XXIV.

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

The project of the new Magazine being
heard of no more, and Mr. Churchill being
consequently deprived of his one hundred and
fifty thousand readers, he laid aside the few notes
he had made for his papers on the Obscure
Martyrs, and turned his thoughts again to the
great Romance. A whole leisure Saturday
afternoon was before him,—pure gold, without
alloy. Ere beginning his task, he stepped
forth into his garden to inhale the sunny air,
and let his thoughts recede a little, in order
to leap farther. When he returned, glowing
and radiant with poetic fancies, he found, to his
unspeakable dismay, an unknown damsel sitting
in his arm-chair. She was rather gayly yet
elegantly dressed, and wore a veil, which she
raised as Mr. Churchill entered, fixing upon
him the full, liquid orbs of her large eyes.

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

“Mr. Churchill, I suppose?” said she, rising,
and stepping forward.

“The same,” replied the school-master, with
dignified courtesy.

“And will you permit me,” she continued,
not without a certain serene self-possession, “to
introduce myself, for want of a better person to
do it for me? My name is Cartwright,—
Clarissa Cartwright.”

This announcement did not produce that powerful
and instantaneous effect on Mr. Churchill
which the speaker seemed to anticipate, or at
least to hope. His eye did not brighten with
any quick recognition, nor did he suddenly
exclaim,—

“What! Are you Miss Cartwright, the
poetess, whose delightful effusions I have seen
in all the magazines?”

On the contrary, he looked rather blank and
expectant, and only said,—

“I am very glad to see you; pray sit down.”

So that the young lady herself was obliged
to communicate the literary intelligence above
alluded to, which she did very gracefully, and
then added,—

“I have come to ask a great favor of you,

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

Mr. Churchill, which I hope you will not deny
me. By the advice of some friends, I have collected
my poems together,”—and here she
drew forth from a paper a large, thin manuscript,
bound in crimson velvet,—“and think of publishing
them in a volume. Now, would you not
do me the favor to look them over, and give
me your candid opinion, whether they are
worth publishing? I should value your advice
so highly!”

This simultaneous appeal to his vanity and
his gallantry from a fair young girl, standing on
the verge of that broad, dangerous ocean, in
which so many have perished, and looking wistfully
over its flashing waters to the shores of
the green Isle of Palms,—such an appeal, from
such a person, it was impossible for Mr. Churchill
to resist. He made, however, a faint show
of resistance,—a feeble grasping after some
excuse for refusal,—and then yielded. He
received from Clarissa's delicate, trembling hand
the precious volume, and from her eyes a still
more precious look of thanks, and then said,—

“What name do you propose to give the
volume?”

“Symphonies of the Soul, and other Poems,”

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

said the young lady; “and, if you like them,
and it would not be asking too much, I should
be delighted to have you write a Preface, to introduce
the work to the public. The publisher
says it would increase the sale very considerably.”

“Ah, the publisher! yes, but that is not very
complimentary to yourself,” suggested Mr.
Churchill. “I can already see your Poems
rebelling against the intrusion of my Preface,
and rising like so many nuns in a convent to
expel the audacious foot that has dared to invade
their sacred precincts.”

But it was all in vain, this pale effort at
pleasantry. Objection was useless; and the
soft-hearted school-master a second time yielded
gracefully to his fate, and promised the Preface.
The young lady took her leave with a profusion
of thanks and blushes; and the dainty manuscript,
with its delicate chirography and crimson
cover, remained in the hands of Mr. Churchill,
who gazed at it less as a Paradise of Dainty
Devices than as a deed or mortgage of so
many precious hours of his own scanty inheritance
of time.

Afterwards, when he complained a little of

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

this to his wife,—who, during the interview, had
peeped in at the door, and, seeing how he was
occupied, had immediately withdrawn,—she said
that nobody was to blame but himself; that he
should learn to say “No!” and not do just as
every romantic little girl from the Academy
wanted him to do; adding, as a final aggravation
and climax of reproof, that she really believed
he never would, and never meant to, begin his
Romance!

XXV.

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

Not long afterwards, Kavanagh and Mr.
Churchill took a stroll together across the fields,
and down green lanes, walking all the bright,
brief afternoon. From the summit of the hill,
beside the old windmill, they saw the sun set;
and, opposite, the full moon rise, dewy, large,
and red. As they descended, they felt the
heavy dampness of the air, like water, rising to
meet them,—bathing with coolness first their
feet, then their hands, then their faces, till they
were submerged in that sea of dew. As they
skirted the woodland on their homeward way,
trampling the golden leaves under foot, they
heard voices at a distance, singing; and then
saw the lights of the camp-meeting gleaming
through the trees, and, drawing nearer, distinguished
a portion of the hymn:—

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

“Don't you hear the Lord a-coming
To the old church-yards,
With a band of music,
With a band of music,
With a band of music,
Sounding through the air?”

These words, at once awful and ludicrous,
rose on the still twilight air from a hundred
voices, thrilling with emotion, and from as many
beating, fluttering, struggling hearts. High above
them all was heard one voice, clear and musical
as a clarion.

“I know that voice,” said Mr. Churchill; “it
is Elder Evans's.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Kavanagh,—for only the
impression of awe was upon him,—“he never
acted in a deeper tragedy than this! How
terrible it is! Let us pass on.”

They hurried away, Kavanagh trembling in
every fibre. Silently they walked, the music
fading into softest vibrations behind them.

“How strange is this fanaticism!” at length
said Mr. Churchill, rather as a relief to his
own thoughts, than for the purpose of reviving
the conversation. “These people really believe
that the end of the world is close at hand.”

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

“And to thousands,” answered Kavanagh,
“this is no fiction,—no illusion of an over-heated
imagination. To-day, to-morrow, every
day, to thousands, the end of the world is close
at hand. And why should we fear it? We
walk here as it were in the crypts of life; at
times, from the great cathedral above us, we
can hear the organ and the chanting of the choir;
we see the light stream through the open door,
when some friend goes up before us; and shall
we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the
grave, that leads us out of this uncertain twilight
into the serene mansions of the life eternal?”

They reached the wooden bridge over the
river, which the moonlight converted into a river
of light. Their footsteps sounded on the planks;
they passed without perceiving a female figure
that stood in the shadow below on the brink of
the stream, watching wistfully the steady flow
of the current. It was Lucy! Her bonnet
and shawl were lying at her feet; and when they
had passed, she waded far out into the shallow
stream, laid herself gently down in its deeper
waves, and floated slowly away into the moon-light,
among the golden leaves that were faded
and fallen like herself,—among the water-lilies,

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

whose fragrant white blossoms had been broken
off and polluted long ago. Without a struggle,
without a sigh, without a sound, she floated downward,
downward, and silently sank into the silent
river. Far off, faint, and indistinct, was heard
the startling hymn, with its wild and peculiar
melody,—


“O, there will be mourning, mourning, mourning, mourning,—

O, there will be mourning, at the judgment-seat of
Christ!”

Kavanagh's heart was full of sadness. He left
Mr. Churchill at his door, and proceeded homeward.
On passing his church, he could not
resist the temptation to go in. He climbed
to his chamber in the tower, lighted by the
moon. He sat for a long time gazing from
the window, and watching a distant and feeble
candle, whose rays scarcely reached him across
the brilliant moon-lighted air. Gentler thoughts
stole over him; an invisible presence soothed
him; an invisible hand was laid upon his head,
and the trouble and unrest of his spirit were
changed to peace.

“Answer me, thou mysterious future!”

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

exclaimed he; “tell me,—shall these things be
according to my desires?”

And the mysterious future, interpreted by those
desires, replied,—

“Soon thou shalt know all. It shall be well
with thee!”

XXVI.

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

On the following morning, Kavanagh sat as
usual in his study in the tower. No traces were
left of the heaviness and sadness of the preceding
night. It was a bright, warm morning; and the
window, open towards the south, let in the genial
sunshine. The odor of decaying leaves scented
the air; far off flashed the hazy river.

Kavanagh's heart, however, was not at rest.
At times he rose from his books, and paced up
and down his little study; then took up his hat
as if to go out; then laid it down again, and
again resumed his books. At length he arose,
and, leaning on the window-sill, gazed for a long
time on the scene before him. Some thought
was laboring in his bosom, some doubt or fear,
which alternated with hope, but thwarted any
fixed resolve.

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

Ah, how pleasantly that fair autumnal landscape
smiled upon him! The great golden elms
that marked the line of the village street, and
under whose shadows no beggars sat; the air
of comfort and plenty, of neatness, thrift, and
equality, visible everywhere; and from far-off
farms the sound of flails, beating the triumphal
march of Ceres through the land;—these were
the sights and sounds that greeted him as he
looked. Silently the yellow leaves fell upon the
graves in the church-yard; and the dew glistened
in the grass, which was still long and green.

Presently his attention was arrested by a dove,
pursued by a little kingfisher, who constantly
endeavoured to soar above it, in order to attack
it at greater advantage. The flight of the birds,
thus shooting through the air at arrowy speed,
was beautiful. When they were opposite the
tower, the dove suddenly wheeled, and darted
in at the open window, while the pursuer held
on his way with a long sweep, and was out of
sight in a moment.

At the first glance, Kavanagh recognized the
dove, which lay panting on the floor. It was
the same he had seen Cecilia buy of the little
man in gray. He took it in his hands. Its heart

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

was beating violently. About its neck was a
silken band; beneath its wing, a billet, upon
which was a single word, “Cecilia.” The bird,
then, was on its way to Cecilia Vaughan. He
hailed the omen as auspicious, and, immediately
closing the window, seated himself at his table,
and wrote a few hurried words, which, being
carefully folded and sealed, he fastened to the
band, and then hastily, as if afraid his purpose
might be changed by delay, opened the window
and set the bird at liberty. It sailed once or
twice round the tower, apparently uncertain and
bewildered, or still in fear of its pursuer. Then,
instead of holding its way over the fields to
Cecilia Vaughan, it darted over the roofs of the
village, and alighted at the window of Alice
Archer.

Having written that morning to Cecilia something
urgent and confidential, she was already
waiting the answer; and, not doubting that the
bird had brought it, she hastily untied the silken
band, and, without looking at the superscription,
opened the first note that fell on the table. It
was very brief; only a few lines, and not a name
mentioned in it; an impulse, an ejaculation of
love; every line quivering with electric fire,—

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

every word a pulsation of the writer's heart.
It was signed “Arthur Kavanagh.”

Overwhelmed by the suddenness and violence
of her emotions, Alice sat for a long time motionless,
holding the open letter in her hand. Then
she read it again, and then relapsed into her
dream of joy and wonder. It would be difficult
to say which of the two emotions was the greater,—
her joy that her prayer for love should be
answered, and so answered,—her wonder that
Kavanagh should have selected her! In the
tumult of her sensations, and hardly conscious
of what she was doing, she folded the note and
replaced it in its envelope. Then, for the first
time, her eye fell on the superscription. It was
“Cecilia Vaughan.” Alice fainted.

On recovering her senses, her first act was one
of heroism. She sealed the note, attached it
to the neck of the pigeon, and sent the messenger
rejoicing on his journey. Then her feelings
had way, and she wept long and bitterly.
Then, with a desperate calmness, she reproved
her own weakness and selfishness, and felt that
she ought to rejoice in the happiness of her
friend, and sacrifice her affection, even her life,
to her. Her heart exculpated Kavanagh from

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

all blame. He had not deluded her; she had
deluded herself. She alone was in fault; and
in deep humiliation, with wounded pride and
wounded love, and utter self-abasement, she
bowed her head and prayed for consolation and
fortitude.

One consolation she already had. The secret
was her own. She had not revealed it even to
Cecilia. Kavanagh did not suspect it. Public
curiosity, public pity, she would not have to
undergo.

She was resigned. She made the heroic
sacrifice of self, leaving her sorrow to the great
physician, Time,—the nurse of care, the healer
of all smarts, the soother and consoler of all
sorrows. And, thenceforward, she became unto
Kavanagh what the moon is to the sun, for ever
following, for ever separated, for ever sad!

As a traveller, about to start upon his journey,
resolved and yet irresolute, watches the clouds,
and notes the struggle between the sunshine and
the showers, and says, “It will be fair; I will
go,”—and again says, “Ah, no, not yet; the
rain is not yet over,”—so at this same hour sat
Cecilia Vaughan, resolved and yet irresolute,
longing to depart upon the fair journey before

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

her, and yet lingering on the paternal threshold,
as if she wished both to stay and to go, seeing
the sky was not without its clouds, nor the road
without its dangers.

It was a beautiful picture, as she sat there
with sweet perplexity in her face, and above it
an immortal radiance streaming from her brow.
She was like Guercino's Sibyl, with the scroll
of fate and the uplifted pen; and the scroll she
held contained but three words,—three words
that controlled the destiny of a man, and, by
their soft impulsion, directed for evermore the
current of his thoughts. They were,—

“Come to me!”

The magic syllables brought Kavanagh to her
side. The full soul is silent. Only the rising
and falling tides rush murmuring through their
channels. So sat the lovers, hand in hand; but
for a long time neither spake,—neither had need
of speech!

XXVII.

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

In the afternoon, Cecilia went to communicate
the news to Alice with her own lips, thinking it
too important to be intrusted to the wings of the
carrier-pigeon. As she entered the door, the
cheerful doctor was coming out; but this was no
unusual apparition, and excited no alarm. Mrs.
Archer, too, according to custom, was sitting in
the little parlour with her decrepit old neighbour,
who seemed almost to have taken up her abode
under that roof, so many hours of every day did
she pass there.

With a light, elastic step, Cecilia bounded up
to Alice's room. She found her reclining in her
large chair, flushed and excited. Sitting down
by her side, and taking both her hands, she said,
with great emotion in the tones of her voice,—

“Dearest Alice, I have brought you some

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

news that I am sure will make you well. For
my sake, you will be no longer ill when you hear
it. I am engaged to Mr. Kavanagh!”

Alice feigned no surprise at this announcement.
She returned the warm pressure of Cecilia's
hand, and, looking affectionately in her face, said
very calmly,—

“I knew it would be so. I knew that he
loved you, and that you would love him.”

“How could I help it?” said Cecilia, her
eyes beaming with dewy light; “could any one
help loving him?”

“No,” answered Alice, throwing her arms
around Cecilia's neck, and laying her head upon
her shoulder; “at least, no one whom he loved.
But when did this happen? Tell me all about
it, dearest!”

Cecilia was surprised, and perhaps a little hurt,
at the quiet, almost impassive manner in which
her friend received this great intelligence. She
had expected exclamations of wonder and delight,
and such a glow of excitement as that with
which she was sure she should have hailed the
announcement of Alice's engagement. But this
momentary annoyance was soon swept away by
the tide of her own joyous sensations, as she

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

proceeded to recall to the recollection of her
friend the thousand little circumstances that had
marked the progress of her love and Kavanagh's;
things which she must have noticed, which she
could not have forgotten; with questions interspersed
at intervals, such as, “Do you recollect
when?” and “I am sure you have not forgotten,
have you?” and dreamy little pauses of
silence, and intercalated sighs. She related to
her, also, the perilous adventure of the carrier-pigeon;
how it had been pursued by the cruel
kingfisher; how it had taken refuge in Kavanagh's
tower, and had been the bearer of his
letter, as well as her own. When she had
finished, she felt her bosom wet with the tears
of Alice, who was suffering martyrdom on that
soft breast, so full of happiness. Tears of
bitterness,—tears of blood! And Cecilia, in
the exultant temper of her soul at the moment,
thought them tears of joy, and pressed Alice
closer to her heart, and kissed and caressed her.

“Ah, how very happy you are, Cecilia!”
at length sighed the poor sufferer, in that slightly
querulous tone, to which Cecilia was not unaccustomed;
“how very happy you are, and how
very wretched am I! You have all the joy of

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

life, I all its loneliness. How little you will
think of me now! How little you will need me!
I shall be nothing to you,—you will forget me.”

“Never, dearest!” exclaimed Cecilia, with
much warmth and sincerity. “I shall love you
only the more. We shall both love you. You
will now have two friends instead of one.”

“Yes; but both will not be equal to the one
I lose. No, Cecilia; let us not make to ourselves
any illusions. I do not. You cannot now
be with me so much and so often as you have
been. Even if you were, your thoughts would
be elsewhere. Ah, I have lost my friend, when
most I needed her!”

Cecilia protested ardently and earnestly, and
dilated with eagerness on her little plan of life, in
which their romantic friendship was to gain only
new strength and beauty from the more romantic
love. She was interrupted by a knock at the
street door; on hearing which, she paused a
moment, and then said,—

“It is Arthur. He was to call for me.”

Ah, what glimpses of home, and fireside, and a
whole life of happiness for Cecilia, were revealed
by that one word of love and intimacy, “Arthur”!
and for Alice, what a sentence of doom!

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

what sorrow without a name! what an endless
struggle of love and friendship, of duty and inclination!
A little quiver of the eyelids and the
hands, a hasty motion to raise her head from
Cecilia's shoulder,—these were the only outward
signs of emotion. But a terrible pang went
to her heart; her blood rushed eddying to her
brain; and when Cecilia had taken leave of her
with the triumphant look of love beaming upon her
brow, and an elevation in her whole attitude and
bearing, as if borne up by attendant angels, she
sank back into her chair, exhausted, fainting,
fearing, longing, hoping to die.

And below sat the two old women, talking of
moths, and cheap furniture, and what was the best
remedy for rheumatism; and from the door went
forth two happy hearts, beating side by side with
the pulse of youth and hope and joy, and within
them and around them was a new heaven and a
new earth!

Only those who have lived in a small town can
really know how great an event therein is a new
engagement. From tongue to tongue passes the
swift countersign; from eye to eye flashes the
illumination of joy, or the bale-fire of alarm; the
streets and houses ring with it, as with the

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

penetrating, all-pervading sound of the village bell;
the whole community feels a thrill of sympathy,
and seems to congratulate itself that all the
great events are by no means confined to the
great towns. As Cecilia and Kavanagh passed
arm in arm through the village, many curious eyes
watched them from the windows, many hearts
grown cold or careless rekindled their household
fires of love from the golden altar of God, borne
through the streets by those pure and holy hands!

The intelligence of the engagement, however,
was received very differently by different persons.
Mrs. Wilmerdings wondered, for her part, why
any body wanted to get married at all. The little
taxidermist said he knew it would be so from the
very first day they had met at his aviary. Miss
Hawkins lost suddenly much of her piety and
all her patience, and laughed rather hysterically.
Mr. Hawkins said it was impossible, but went
in secret to consult a friend, an old bachelor, on
the best remedy for love; and the old bachelor,
as one well versed in such affairs, gravely advised
him to think of the lady as a beautiful statue!

Once more the indefatigable school-girl took
up her pen, and wrote to her foreign correspondent
a letter that might rival the famous epistle of

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, announcing
the engagement of Mademoiselle Montpensier.
Through the whole of the first page, she told her
to guess who the lady was; through the whole of
the second, who the gentleman was; the third
was devoted to what was said about it in the
village; and on the fourth there were two postscripts,
one at the top and the other at the bottom,
the first stating that they were to be married
in the Spring, and to go to Italy immediately
afterwards, and the last, that Alice Archer was
dangerously ill with a fever.

As for the Churchills, they could find no words
powerful enough to express their delight, but
gave vent to it in a banquet on Thanksgiving-day,
in which the wife had all the trouble and the
husband all the pleasure. In order that the
entertainment might be worthy of the occasion,
Mr. Churchill wrote to the city for the best
cookery-book; and the bookseller, executing the
order in all its amplitude, sent him the Practical
Guide to the Culinary Art in all its Branches, by
Frascatelli, pupil of the celebrated Carême, and
Chief Cook to Her Majesty the Queen,—a
ponderous volume, illustrated with numerous engravings,
and furnished with bills of fare for every

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

month in the year, and any number of persons.
This great work was duly studied, evening after
evening; and Mr. Churchill confessed to his wife,
that, although at first startled by the size of the
book, he had really enjoyed it very highly, and
had been much pleased to be present in imagination
at so many grand entertainments, and to sit
opposite the Queen without having to change his
dress or the general style of his conversation.

The dinner hour, as well as the dinner itself,
was duly debated. Mr. Churchill was in favor
of the usual hour of one; but his wife thought it
should be an hour later. Whereupon he re
marked,—

“King Henry the Eighth dined at ten o'clock
and supped at four. His queen's maids of honor
had a gallon of ale and a chine of beef for their
breakfast.”

To which his wife answered,—

“I hope we shall have something a little more
refined than that.”

The day on which the banquet should take
place was next discussed, and both agreed that
no day could be so appropriate as Thanksgiving-day;
for, as Mrs. Churchill very truly remarked,
it was really a day of thanksgiving to Kavanagh.
She then said,—

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

“How very solemnly he read the Governor's
Proclamation yesterday! particularly the words
`God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!'
And what a Proclamation it was!
When he spread it out on the pulpit, it looked
like a table-cloth!”

Mr. Churchill then asked,—

“What day of the week is the first of December?
Let me see,—


`At Dover dwells George Brown, Esquire,
Good Christopher Finch and Daniel Friar!'
Thursday.”

“I could have told you that,” said his wife,
“by a shorter process than your old rhyme.
Thanksgiving-day always comes on Thursday.”

These preliminaries being duly settled, the
dinner was given.

There being only six guests, and the dinner
being modelled upon one for twenty-four persons,
Russian style in November, it was very abundant.
It began with a Colbert soup, and ended with a
Nesselrode pudding; but as no allusion was made
in the course of the repast to the French names
of the dishes, and the mutton, and turnips, and
pancakes were all called by their English

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

patronymics, the dinner appeared less magnificent in
reality than in the bill of fare, and the guests did
not fully appreciate how superb a banquet they
were enjoying. The hilarity of the occasion
was not marred by any untoward accident;
though once or twice Mr. Churchill was much
annoyed, and the company much amused, by
Master Alfred, who was allowed to be present
at the festivities, and audibly proclaimed what
was coming, long before it made its appearance.
When the dinner was over, several of the guests
remembered brilliant and appropriate things they
might have said, and wondered they were so
dull as not to think of them in season; and when
they were all gone, Mr. Churchill remarked to his
wife that he had enjoyed himself very much, and
that he should like to ask his friends to just such
a dinner every week!

XXVIII.

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

The first snow came. How beautiful it was,
falling so silently, all day long, all night long, on
the mountains, on the meadows, on the roofs of
the living, on the graves of the dead! All white
save the river, that marked its course by a
winding black line across the landscape; and
the leafless trees, that against the leaden sky
now revealed more fully the wonderful beauty and
intricacy of their branches!

What silence, too, came with the snow, and
what seclusion! Every sound was muffled, every
noise changed to something soft and musical.
No more trampling hoofs,—no more rattling
wheels! Only the chiming sleigh-bells, beating
as swift and merrily as the hearts of children.

All day long, all night long, the snow fell on
the village and on the church-yard; on the happy

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

home of Cecilia Vaughan, on the lonely grave
of Alice Archer! Yes; for before the winter
came she had gone to that land where winter
never comes. Her long domestic tragedy was
ended. She was dead; and with her had died
her secret sorrow and her secret love. Kavanagh
never knew what wealth of affection for him
faded from the world when she departed; Cecilia
never knew what fidelity of friendship, what
delicate regard, what gentle magnanimity, what
angelic patience had gone with her into the grave;
Mr. Churchill never knew, that, while he was exploring
the Past for records of obscure and unknown
martyrs, in his own village, near his own
door, before his own eyes, one of that silent
sisterhood had passed away into oblivion, unnoticed
and unknown.

How often, ah, how often, between the desire
of the heart and its fulfilment, lies only the briefest
space of time and distance, and yet the desire
remains forever unfulfilled! It is so near that we
can touch it with the hand, and yet so far away
that the eye cannot perceive it. What Mr.
Churchill most desired was before him. The
Romance he was longing to find and record had
really occurred in his neighbourhood, among his

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

own friends. It had been set like a picture
into the frame-work of his life, inclosed within
his own experience. But he could not see it
as an object apart from himself; and as he was
gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct,
the nearer incidents of aspiration, love,
and death, escaped him. They were too near to
be clothed by the imagination with the golden
vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial,
and only the distant and unknown completely fill
and satisfy the mind.

The winter did not pass without its peculiar
delights and recreations. The singing of the
great wood fires; the blowing of the wind over
the chimney-tops, as if they were organ pipes;
the splendor of the spotless snow; the purple
wall built round the horizon at sunset; the sea-suggesting
pines, with the moan of the billows in
their branches, on which the snows were furled
like sails; the northern lights; the stars of steel;
the transcendent moonlight, and the lovely shadows
of the leafless trees upon the snow;—these
things did not pass unnoticed nor unremembered.
Every one of them made its record upon the
heart of Mr. Churchill.

His twilight walks, his long Saturday afternoon

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

rambles, had again become solitary; for Kavanagh
was lost to him for such purposes, and his wife
was one of those women who never walk.
Sometimes he went down to the banks of the
frozen river, and saw the farmers crossing it
with their heavy-laden sleds, and the Fairmeadow
schooner imbedded in the ice; and thought of
Lapland sledges, and the song of Kulnasatz, and
the dismantled, ice-locked vessels of the explorers
in the Arctic Ocean. Sometimes he went to the
neighbouring lake, and saw the skaters wheeling
round their fire, and speeding away before the
wind; and in his imagination arose images of the
Norwegian Skate-Runners, bearing the tidings of
King Charles's death from Frederickshall to
Drontheim, and of the retreating Swedish army,
frozen to death in its fireless tents among the
mountains. And then he would watch the cutting
of the ice with ploughs, and the horses dragging
the huge blocks to the store-houses, and
contrast them with the Grecian mules, bearing the
snows of Mount Parnassus to the markets of
Athens, in panniers protected from the sun by
boughs of oleander and rhododendron.

The rest of his leisure hours were employed in
any thing and every thing save in writing his

[figure description] Page 171.[end figure description]

Romance. A great deal of time was daily
consumed in reading the newspapers, because it
was necessary, he said, to keep up with the
times; and a great deal more in writing a
Lyceum Lecture, on “What Lady Macbeth
might have been, had her energies been properly
directed.” He also made some little progress in
a poetical arithmetic, founded on Bhascara's, but
relinquished it, because the school committee
thought it was not practical enough, and more
than hinted that he had better adhere to the old
system. And still the vision of the great
Romance moved before his mind, august and
glorious, a beautiful mirage of the desert.

XXIX.

[figure description] Page 172.[end figure description]

The wedding did not take place till Spring.
And then Kavanagh and his Cecilia departed on
their journey to Italy and the East,—a sacred
mission, a visit like the Apostle's to the Seven
Churches, nay, to all the Churches of Christendom;
hoping by some means to sow in many
devout hearts the desire and prophecy that filled
his own,—the union of all sects into one universal
Church of Christ. They intended to be absent
one year only; they were gone three. It seemed
to their friends that they never wonld return.
But at length they came,—the long absent, the
long looked for, the long desired,—bearing with
them that delicious perfume of travel, that genial,
sunny atmosphere, and soft, Ausonian air, which
returning travellers always bring about them.

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

It was night when they reached the village,
and they could not see what changes had taken
place in it during their absence. How it had
dilated and magnified itself,—how it had puffed
itself up, and bedizened itself with flaunting,
ostentatious signs,—how it stood, rotund and
rubicund with brick, like a portly man, with his
back to the fire and both hands in his pockets,
warm, expansive, apoplectic, and entertaining a
very favorable opinion of himself,—all this they
did not see, for the darkness; but Kavanagh
beheld it all, and more, when he went forth on
the following morning.

How Cecilia's heart beat as they drove up the
avenue to the old house! The piny odors in the
night air, the solitary light at her father's window,
the familiar bark of the dog Major at the sound of
the wheels, awakened feelings at once new and
old. A sweet perplexity of thought, a strange
familiarity, a no less pleasing strangeness! The
lifting of the heavy brass latch, and the jarring of
the heavy brass knocker as the door closed, were
echoes from her childhood. Mr. Vaughan they
found, as usual, among his papers in the study;—
the same bland, white-haired man, hardly a day
older than when they left him there. To Cecilia

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

the whole long absence in Italy became a dream,
and vanished away. Even Kavanagh was for the
moment forgotten. She was a daughter, not a
wife;—she had not been married, she had not
been in Italy!

In the morning, Kavanagh sallied forth to find
the Fairmeadow of his memory, but found it not.
The railroad had completely transformed it. The
simple village had become a very precocious
town. New shops, with new names over the
doors; new streets, with new forms and faces in
them; the whole town seemed to have been taken
and occupied by a besieging army of strangers.
Nothing was permanent but the work-house,
standing alone in the pasture by the river; and,
at the end of the street, the school-house, that
other work-house, where in childhood we pick
and untwist the cordage of the brain, that, later in
life, we may not be obliged to pull to pieces the
more material cordage of old ships.

Kavanagh soon turned in despair from the main
street into a little green lane, where there were
few houses, and where the barberry still nodded
over the old stone wall;—a place he had much
loved in the olden time for its silence and seclusion.
He seemed to have entered his ancient

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

realm of dreams again, and was walking with his
hat drawn a little over his eyes. He had not
proceeded far, when he was startled by a woman's
voice, quite sharp and loud, crying from the opposite
side of the lane. Looking up, he beheld a
small cottage, against the wall of which rested a
ladder, and on this ladder stood the woman from
whom the voice came. Her face was nearly
concealed by a spacious gingham sun-bonnet, and
in her right hand she held extended a large brush,
with which she was painting the front of her
cottage, when interrupted by the approach of
Kavanagh, who, thinking she was calling to him,
but not understanding what she said, made haste
to cross over to her assistance. At this movement
her tone became louder and more peremptory;
and he could now understand that her cry
was rather a warning than an invitation.

“Go away!” she said, flourishing her brush.
“Go away! What are you coming down here
for, when I am on the ladder, painting my house?
If you don't go right about your business, I will
come down and—”

“Why, Miss Manchester!” exclaimed Kavanagh;
“how could I know that you would be
going up the ladder just as I came down the
lane?”

[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]

“Well, I declare! if it is not Mr. Kavanagh!”

And she scrambled down the ladder backwards
with as much grace as the circumstances permitted.
She, too, like the rest of his friends in the
village, showed symptoms of growing older. The
passing years had drunk a portion of the light
from her eyes, and left their traces on her cheeks,
as birds that drink at lakes leave their foot-prints
on the margin. But the pleasant smile remained,
and reminded him of the by-gone days, when she
used to open for him the door of the gloomy
house under the poplars.

Many things had she to ask, and many to tell;
and for full half an hour Kavanagh stood leaning
over the paling, while she remained among the
hollyhocks, as stately and red as the plants themselves.
At parting, she gave him one of the
flowers for his wife; and, when he was fairly out
of sight, again climbed the perilous ladder, and
resumed her fresco painting.

Through all the vicissitudes of these later years,
Sally had remained true to her principles and
resolution. At Mrs. Archer's death, which occured
soon after Kavanagh's wedding, she had
retired to this little cottage, bought and paid for

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

by her own savings. Though often urged by
Mr. Vaughan's man, Silas, who breathed his
soul out upon the air of Summer evenings
through a keyed bugle, she resolutely refused to
marry. In vain did he send her letters written
with his own blood,—going barefooted into the
brook to be bitten by leeches, and then using
his feet as inkstands: she refused again and
again. Was it that in some blue chamber,
or some little warm back parlour, of her heart,
the portrait of the inconstant dentist was still
hanging? Alas, no! But as to some hearts it
is given in youth to blossom with the fragrant
blooms of young desire, so others are doomed
by a mysterious destiny to be checked in Spring
by chill winds, blowing over the bleak common
of the world. So had it been with her desires
and thoughts of love. Fear now predominated
over hope; and to die unmarried had become
to her a fatality which she dared not resist.

In the course of his long conversation with Miss
Manchester, Kavanagh learned many things about
the inhabitants of the town. Mrs. Wilmerdings
was still carrying on her labors in the “Dunstable
and eleven-braid, open-work and colored
straws.” Her husband had taken to the tavern,

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

and often came home very late, “with a brick
in his hat,” as Sally expressed it. Their son
and heir was far away in the Pacific, on board
a whale-ship. Miss Amelia Hawkins remained
unmarried, though possessing a talent for matrimony
which amounted almost to genius. Her
brother, the poet, was no more. Finding it impossible
to follow the old bachelor's advice, and
look upon Miss Vaughan as a beautiful statue,
he made one or two attempts, but in vain, to
throw himself away on unworthy objects, and
then died. At this event, two elderly maidens
went into mourning simultaneously, each thinking
herself engaged to him; and suddenly went out
of it again, mutually indignant with each other,
and mortified with themselves. The little taxidermist
was still hopping about in his aviary,
looking more than ever like his gray African
parrot. Mrs. Archer's house was uninhabited.

XXX.

[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]

Kavanagh continued his walk in the direction
of Mr. Churchill's residence. This, at least,
was unchanged,—quite unchanged. The same
white front; the same brass knocker; the same
old wooden gate, with its chain and ball; the same
damask roses under the windows; the same sunshine
without and within. The outer door and
study door were both open, as usual in the warm
weather; and at the table sat Mr. Churchill,
writing. Over each ear was a black and inky
stump of a pen, which, like the two ravens
perched on Odin's shoulders, seemed to whisper
to him all that passed in heaven and on earth.
On this occasion, their revelations were of the
earth. He was correcting school exercises.

The joyful welcome of Mr. Churchill, as
Kavanagh entered, and the cheerful sound of

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

their voices, soon brought Mrs. Churchill to the
study,—her eyes bluer than ever, her cheeks
fairer, her form more round and full. The
children came in also,—Alfred grown to boy's
estate and exalted into a jacket; and the baby
that was, less than two years behind him, and
catching all his falling mantles, and all his tricks
and maladies.

Kavanagh found Mr. Churchill precisely where
he left him. He had not advanced one step,—
not one. The same dreams, the same longings,
the same aspirations, the same indecision. A
thousand things had been planned, and none completed.
His imagination seemed still to exhaust
itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch.
While he mused, the fire burned in other brains.
Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about.
He freely used his good ideas in conversation,
and in letters; and they were straightway wrought
into the texture of other men's books, and so
lost to him for ever. His work on Obscure
Martyrs was anticipated by Mr. Hathaway, who,
catching the idea from him, wrote and published
a series of papers on Unknown Saints, before
Mr. Churchill had fairly arranged his materials.
Before he had written a chapter of his great

[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]

Romance, another friend and novelist had published
one on the same subject.

Poor Mr. Churchill! So far as fame and external
success were concerned, his life certainly
was a failure. He was, perhaps, too deeply
freighted, too much laden by the head, to ride
the waves gracefully. Every sea broke over
him,—he was half the time under water!

All his defects and mortifications he attributed
to the outward circumstances of his life, the exigencies
of his profession, the accidents of chance.
But, in reality, they lay much deeper than this.
They were within himself. He wanted the all-controlling,
all-subduing will. He wanted the
fixed purpose that sways and bends all circumstances
to its uses, as the wind bends the reeds
and rushes beneath it.

In a few minutes, and in that broad style of
handling, in which nothing is distinctly defined, but
every thing clearly suggested, Kavanagh sketched
to his friends his three years' life in Italy and the
East. And then, turning to Mr. Churchill, he
said,—

“And you, my friend,—what have you been
doing all this while? You have written to me
so rarely that I have hardly kept pace with you.

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But I have thought of you constantly. In all the
old cathedrals; in all the lovely landscapes;
among the Alps and Apennines; in looking down
on Duomo d'Ossola; at the Inn of Baveno; at
Gaeta; at Naples; in old and mouldy Rome;
in older Egypt; in the Holy Land; in all galleries
and churches and ruins; in our rural retirement
at Fiesoli;—whenever I have seen any
thing beautiful, I have thought of you, and of
how much you would have enjoyed it!”

Mr. Churchill sighed; and then, as if, with a
touch as masterly, he would draw a picture that
should define nothing, but suggest every thing,
he said,—

“You have no children, Kavanagh; we have
five.”

“Ah, so many already!” exclaimed Kavanagh.
“A living Pentateuch! A beautiful Pentapylon,
or five-gated temple of Life! A charming
number!”

“Yes,” answered Mr. Churchill; “a beautiful
number; Juno's own; the wedding of the first
even and first uneven numbers; the number
sacred to marriage, but having no reference,
direct or indirect, to the Pythagorean novitiate
of five years of silence.”

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“No; it certainly is not the vocation of children
to be silent,” said Kavanagh, laughing.
“That would be out of nature; saving always
the children of the brain, which do not often make
so much noise in the world as we desire. I hope
a still larger family of these has grown up around
you during my absence.”

“Quite otherwise,” answered the school-master,
sadly. “My brain has been almost barren
of songs. I have only been trifling; and I am
afraid, that, if I play any longer with Apollo, the
untoward winds will blow the discus of the god
against my forehead, and strike me dead with it,
as they did Hyacinth of old.”

“And your Romance,—have you been more
successful with that? I hope it is finished, or
nearly finished?”

“Not yet begun,” said Mr. Churchill. “The
plan and characters still remain vague and indefinite
in my mind. I have not even found a name
for it.”

“That you can determine after the book is
written,” suggested Kavanagh. “You can name
it, for instance, as the old Heimskringla was
named, from the initial word of the first chapter.”

“Ah! that was very well in the olden time,

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and in Iceland, when there were no quarterly
reviews. It would be called affectation now.”

“I see you still stand a little in awe of opinion.
Never fear that. The strength of criticism lies
only in the weakness of the thing criticized.”

“That is the truth, Kavanagh; and I am
more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving
it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The
secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are
conscious, are often more difficult to bear than
those which have been publicly censured in us,
and thus in some degree atoned for.”

“I will not say,” replied Kavanagh, “that
humility is the only road to excellence, but I am
sure that it is one road.”

“Yes, humility; but not humiliation,” sighed
Mr. Churchill, despondingly. “As for excellence,
I can only desire it, and dream of it; I
cannot attain to it; it lies too far from me; I
cannot reach it. These very books about me
here, that once stimulated me to action, have
now become my accusers. They are my Eumenides,
and drive me to despair.”

“My friend,” said Kavanagh, after a short
pause, during which he had taken note of Mr.
Churchill's sadness, “that is not always

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excellent which lies far away from us. What is remote
and difficult of access we are apt to overrate;
what is really best for us lies always within
our reach, though often overlooked. To speak
frankly, I am afraid this is the case with your
Romance. You are evidently grasping at something
which lies beyond the confines of your own
experience, and which, consequently, is only a
play of shadows in the realm of fancy. The
figures have no vitality; they are only outward
shows, wanting inward life. We can give to
others only what we have.”

“And if we have nothing worth giving?” interrupted
Mr. Churchill.

“No man is so poor as that. As well might
the mountain streamlets say they have nothing
worth giving to the sea, because they are not
rivers. Give what you have. To some one, it
may be better than you dare to think. If you
had looked nearer for the materials of your
Romance, and had set about it in earnest, it
would now have been finished.”

“And burned, perhaps,” interposed Mr.
Churchill; “or sunk with the books of Simon
Magus to the bottom of the Dead Sea.”

“At all events, you would have had the

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

pleasure of writing it. I remember one of the old
traditions of Art, from which you may perhaps
draw a moral. When Raphael desired to paint
his Holy Family, for a long time he strove in
vain to express the idea that filled and possessed
his soul. One morning, as he walked beyond the
city gates, meditating the sacred theme, he beheld,
sitting beneath a vine at her cottage door, a
peasant woman, holding a boy in her arms, while
another leaned upon her knee, and gazed at the
approaching stranger. The painter found here, in
real life, what he had so long sought for in vain in
the realms of his imagination; and quickly, with
his chalk pencil, he sketched, upon the head of a
wine-cask that stood near them, the lovely group,
which afterwards, when brought into full perfection,
became the transcendent Madonna della
Seggiola.”

“All this is true,” replied Mr. Churchill,
“but it gives me no consolation. I now despair
of writing any thing excellent. I have no time to
devote to meditation and study. My life is given
to others, and to this destiny I submit without a
murmur; for I have the satisfaction of having
labored faithfully in my calling, and of having
perhaps trained and incited others to do what I

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shall never do. Life is still precious to me for
its many uses, of which the writing of books is
but one. I do not complain, but accept this
destiny, and say, with that pleasant author,
Marcus Antoninus, `Whatever is agreeable to
thee shall be agreeable to me, O graceful Universe!
nothing shall be to me too early or too
late, which is seasonable to thee! Whatever thy
seasons bear shall be joyful fruit to me, O
Nature! from thee are all things; in thee they
subsist; to thee they return. Could one say,
Thou dearly beloved city of Cecrops? and wilt
thou not say, Thou dearly beloved city of
God?”'

“Amen!” said Kavanagh. “And, to follow
your quotation with another, `The gale that
blows from God we must endure, toiling but not
repining.”'

Here Mrs. Churchill, who had something of
Martha in her, as well as of Mary, and had left
the room when the conversation took a literary
turn, came back to announce that dinner was
ready, and Kavanagh, though warmly urged to
stay, took his leave, having first obtained from the
Churchills the promise of a visit to Cecilia during
the evening.

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“Nothing done! nothing done!” exclaimed
he, as he wended his way homeward, musing and
meditating. “And shall all these lofty aspirations
end in nothing? Shall the arms be thus
stretched forth to encircle the universe, and come
back empty against a bleeding, aching breast?”

And the words of the poet came into his
mind, and he thought them worthy to be written
in letters of gold, and placed above every door in
every house, as a warning, a suggestion, an incitement:—



“Stay, stay the present instant!
Imprint the marks of wisdom on its wings!
O, let it not elude thy grasp, but like
The good old patriarch upon record,
Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee!”