s the 'moving why' of the old man, in isolating himself from his kind,
in one of the great green deserts of the West, 'for which the speech of
England hath no name.'

A DREAM OF YOUTH.

Sixty years old! Many sorrows, many storms encountered, both within and
without, and much journeying along the road of life, have left their
traces on my features and on my head; but I am thankful that they have not
touched my heart. I live alone, but not solitary; for I hold daily
communion with the absent and beloved; communion also, sad but sweet, with
the departed. The forms of those once hated too, are ready to rise up at
my bidding; but they are never summoned. For I wish all within me to be
gentleness and repose; and it ill becomes me on this my last failing
foothold on the verge of the grave, to allow thoughts of hatred to stir up
the turbid waters of bitterness which have been slumbering so many years
in my heart.

So I stand up here calmly at the end of my journey, and look back on the
path which I have trodden. And what a path! Far back it runs, growing
fainter and narrower, till I lose sight of it, an indistinct line, in the
distance. I shall not say how many steep hills it crosses, where it might
better have kept in the plains; how many deviations it makes from a
straight course, apparently for the sole purpose of wandering through
difficult places; or how often it runs along over burning sandy deserts,
parallel with, and but a few steps from, the verge of a cool and pleasant
meadow. I shall say nothing of this; for of the million of paths that
intersect this vast plain of Life, there is probably not one which, when
the traveller looks back upon it, does not like mine seem marked out by
the veriest caprice of chance. Each one gropes its way along, like the
crooked track of a blind man; and when it would appear the easier and
almost the only way to keep on up the gentle eminence, whereon might have
been found renown and happiness, by that same constant fatality, it
suddenly turns short off to one side, plunges down into the rocky ravine,
and pants on, for many a weary mile. That man shapes not his own ends, is
a truth which I felt long since, and which each day's experience brings
home to me with the freshness of a new discovery. It is a truth which
rises up and mocks us, when we sit down to calculate or plan for the
future; and it almost staggers our confidence in the connection between
human means and the desired result