A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.

I.

The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless
trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition
which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to
see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we
feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal
melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward
that dreary November sunset.

Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because
of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the
cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its
space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late
as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I
had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on
one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself
with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its
origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities.
Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the
earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first
discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the
English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought
their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin,
and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the
mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all
dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that
it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young
oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all
sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to
the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water
some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror
their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing
inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.

I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends,
and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that
which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The
very name of things passes with the things themselves, and

"Glory is like a circle i