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

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

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

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

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

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

“Philip!” she said.

“I listen, dear Edith!”

“I am dying.”

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

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

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

“I had proceeded perhaps a mile—my forehead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eaf415v1.n2

[2] “La paresse dans les femmes est le présage de l'amour.”—La
Bruyere.

p415-177

“Boy.

Will you not sleep, Sir?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was one, I say, who walked the thronged
pavement alone that night, or but with such company
as Uhland's;[3] yet the heart of that solitary senior was
far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was
in his grasp,—the reward of daily self-denial and midnight
watching,—the prize of a straining mind and a
yearning desire;—and there was not one of the many
who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms,
either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its
attainment, who had the shadow of an idea what
spirit sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common
is this ignorance of human motives! How distant,
and slight, and unsuspected are the springs often of
the most desperate achievement! How little the world
knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the
politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life!
And how insignificant and unequal to the result would
seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back
from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty
they have waked and exhausted! It is a startling
thing to question even your own soul for its motive.
Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at
the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this
sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and,
as I live, the face that is conjured at my bidding is of
one of whom I have not had a definite thought for

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

I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this
improvista digression, (for, like “Opportunity and the
Hours,” I “never look back;”[4])—but let us return to
the shadow of the thousand elms of New-Haven.

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

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

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

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

eaf415v1.n3

[3] Almost the sweetest thing I remember is the German poet's thought
when crossing the ferry to his wife and child.—

eaf415v1.n4

[4] Walter Savage Landor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Phil?”

“What, my dear boy?”

“Will you do me a kindness?”

“Certainly.”

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

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

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

“Without a doubt.”

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

“Perhaps. But will that content you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”

“You know Smith—my chum.”

“Certainly.”

“I have just come from him.”

“Well!”

“He is gone mad!”

“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”

“Stark and furious!”

“Gracious goodness!”

“And all for you!”

“For me!!”

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

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

“Gracious!”

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

“Good gracious!”

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

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

Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good God! are you mocking me?”

“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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