ndency of thought, when rendered
sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the
chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
young girl!

At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future,
which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to
speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the
reverberation of the other.

"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present
like a giant's dead body In fact, the case is just as if a young giant
were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse
of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle
you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give
the matter the right word!"

"But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.

"For example, then," continued Holgrave: "a dead man, if he happens to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die
of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We
worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white,
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; a