anged and quiet.
Sit down, and let me push the arm-chair up
Where I can note the changes in thy face;
For 'tis a traitor, that sweet face of thine,
And has a sign for every fleeting thought.

"But here's our little mother! Come, my dear,
And take a seat by Linda; thou didst help me
To graft upon the bitter past a fruit
All sweetness, and thy very presence now
Can take the sting from a too sad remembrance."

The mother placed her hand upon his brow
And said: "The water-lily springs from mud;
So springs the future from the past." Then he:
"My father's death made me, at twenty-one,
Heir to a fortune which in those slow days
Was thought sufficient: I had quitted Yale
With some slight reputation as a scholar,
And, in the first flush of ingenuous youth
When brave imagination's rosy hue
Tinges all unknown objects, I was launched
Into society in this great place;--
Sisterless, motherless, and having seen
But little, in my student life, of women.

"All matrons who had marriageable girls
Looked on me as their proper prey, and spread
Their nets to catch me; and, poor, verdant youth,
Soon I was caught,--caught in a snare indeed,
Though by no mother's clever management.
Young, beautiful, accomplished, she, my Fate,
Met me with smiles, and doomed me while she smiled
Nimble as light, fluent as molten lead
To take the offered mould,--apt to affect
Each preference of taste or sentiment
That best might flatter,--affable and kind,
Or seeming so,--and generous to a fault,--
But that was when she had a part to play,--
Affectionate--ah! there too she was feigning--
As I look calmly back, to me she seems
The simple incarnation of a mind
Possessed of all the secrets of the heart,
And quick to substitute a counterfeit
For the heart's genuine coin, and make it pass;
But void of feeling as the knife that wounds!
And so the game was in her hands, and she
Played it with confident, remorseless skill
Even to the bitter end.

"Yet do not think
The inner prescience never stirred or spoke:
Veiled though it be from consciousness so strangely,
And its fine voice unheard amid the din
Of outward things, the quest of earthly passion,
There is an under-sense, a faculty
All independent of our mortal organs,
And circumscribed by neither space nor time.
Else whence proceed they, those clairvoyant glimpses,