imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.--In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,--

--in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering
down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the
small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets
proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair
Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's
memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower
shores,--up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where
Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to
lead the Commencement processions,--where blue Ascutney looked down
from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor
always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing
masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to
look through his old "Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not
within range of sight,--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks
that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to
the terminus of their harmless stroll,--the patulous fage, in the
Professor's classic dialect,--the spreading beech, in more familiar
phrase,--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done
yet, and we have another long journey before us,]--

--and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic,--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs
that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes,--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks
of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter
snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest
waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,--suggestive
to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out
by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of
the forest,--in that home where seven blessed summers were passed,
which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the
beatific vision of the holy dreamer,--

--in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet
not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,--full of great