astic welcome than was my wont.

"Oh! it is terrible to smile when the heart is breaking! to talk
lightly and freely and mirthfully, when every feeling of the mind is
wrung with unutterable agony; to mingle in the laugh and in the gay
volleys of convivial fellowship,

'With the difficult utterance of one
Whose heart is with an iron nerve put down.'

"Yet all this I endured, hour after hour, until my friends departed and I
had pressed their hands as at a common parting, while my heart whispered
an everlasting farewell!

"It was late when they left me. I walked out to look for the last time
upon Nature in her exceeding beauty. I hardly acknowledged to myself
that such was my purpose; but yet I did feel that it was so; and that I
was taking an everlasting farewell of the beautiful things around me.
The sun was just setting; and the hills, that rose like pillars of the
blue horizon, were glowing with a light which was fast deserting the
valleys. It was an evening of summer; everything was still; not a leaf
stirred in the dark, overshadowing foliage; but, silent and beautiful as
a picture, the wide scenery of rock and hill and woodland, stretched
away before me; and, beautiful as it was, it seemed to possess a newness
and depth of beauty beyond its ordinary appearance, as if to aggravate
the pangs of the last, long farewell.

"They do not err who believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate
Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and
affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own
fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his
love of flowing waters, and soft green shadows, and pleasant blowing
flowers, and in his admiration of the mountain, stretching away into
heaven, sublimed and awful in its cloudy distance; the heave and swell
of the infinite ocean; the thunder of the leaping cataract; and the
onward rush of mighty rivers, which tells of its original source, and
bears evidence of its kindred affinities. Nor was the dream of the
ancient Chaldean 'all a dream.' The stars of heaven, the beauty and the
glory above us, have their influences and their power, not evil and
malignant and partial and irrevocable, but holy and tranquillizing and
benignant, a moral influence, by which all may profit if they will do
so. And I have often marvelled at the hard depravity of that human
heart which could sanction a deed of