y.

"When I stole these furtive glances at my grandmother, half fearing
that they were wrong, I saw only a calm lake, whose shores were low,
and over which the sky hung unbroken, so that the least star was
clearly reflected. It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight
tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with
the cloudless, star-studded sky, that, when I looked through my
spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and
stars. Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might
well have been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity
over the calm, like coruscations of pearls.

"I dreamed of gorgeous fleets, silken sailed and blown by perfumed
winds, drifting over those depthless waters and through those spacious
skies. I gazed upon the twilight, the inscrutable silence, like a
God-fearing discoverer upon a new, and vast, and dim sea, bursting
upon him through forest glooms, and in the fervor of whose impassioned
gaze, a millennial and poetic world arises, and man need no longer die
to be happy.

"My companions naturally deserted me, for I had grown wearily grave
and abstracted: and, unable to resist the allurement of my spectacles,
I was constantly lost in a world, of which those companions were part,
yet of which they knew nothing. I grew cold and hard, almost morose;
people seemed to me blind and unreasonable. They did the wrong thing.
They called green, yellow; and black, white. Young men said of a girl,
'What a lovely, simple creature!' I looked, and there was only a
glistening wisp of straw, dry and hollow. Or they said, 'What a cold,
proud beauty!' I looked, and lo! a Madonna, whose heart held the
world. Or they said, 'What a wild, giddy girl!' and I saw a glancing,
dancing mountain stream, pure as the virgin snows whence it flowed,
singing through sun and shade, over pearls and gold dust, slipping
along unstained by weed, or rain, or heavy foot of cattle, touching
the flowers with a dewy kiss,--a beam of grace, a happy song, a line
of light, in the dim and troubled landscape.

"My grandmother sent me to school, but I looked at the master, and saw
that he was a smooth, round ferule--or an improper noun--or a vulgar
fraction, and refused to obey him. Or he was a piece of string, a rag,
a willow-wand, and I had a contemptuous pity. But one was a well of
cool, deep water, and looking suddenly in, one day, I saw the stars.
He gave me all my schooling.