ed a great, white
serpent, winding among green fields and noble forests, for twenty miles
below. Her eyes were gray, and large, and lovely; her form was
towering, and her mien commanding. She grew with the scene. She was
born only a mile away, in the midst of a wild forest of walnut and
magnolia, amid towering hills, and cherished them and this mighty river
in childhood, until she partook of their grandeur and greatness. I
thought she was like the love of my youth, and I loved her, and told
her of it. The sun was waning--going down to rest, and, like a mighty
monarch, was folding himself away to sleep in gorgeous robes of crimson
and gold. In his shaded light, outstretching for fifty miles beyond the
river, lay, in sombre silence, the mighty swamp, with its wonderful
trees of cypress, clothed in moss of gray, long, and festooning from
their summits to the earth below, and waving, like banners, in the
passing wind. The towering magnolia, in all the pride of foliage and
flower, shaded us. The river, in silent and dignified majesty, moved
onward far below, and evening breezes bathed, with their delicious
touch, our glowing cheeks. The scene was grand, and my feelings were
intense. In the midst of all this beauty and grandeur, she was the
cynosure of eye and heart. I loved her; and yet, my conscience rebuked
me for forgetting my first love, and I asked myself if, in all this
wild delirium of soul, there was not some little ingredient of revenge.
No, it was for herself--all for herself; and, chokingly, I told her of
it, when she drooped her head, and, in silence, gave me her hand. We
went away in silence. There was too much of feeling to admit of speech.
Delicious memory! Of all our ten children, four only remain. The
willow's tears bedew her grave, and her sons fill the soldier's grave,
and, wrapped in the gray, sleep well.

Yesterday I met her who first kindled in my bosom affection for
woman--a widowed woman, withered and old. She smiled: the lingering
trace of what it was, was all that was left. The little, plump hand was
lean and bony, and wrinkles usurped the alabaster brow. Fifty years had
made its mark. But memory was, by time, untouched. We parted. I closed
my eyes, and there she was, in her girlhood's robes and her girlhood's
beauty. The lip, the cheek, the glorious eye, were all in memory
garnered still; and I loved that memory, but not the woman now. Another
was in the niche she first cut in my heart, whose cheek