fire to stifle, and drench its
approaches with seas to drown,--there is that within that God alone can
vanquish,--yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the
fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the
leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about
me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every
leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight,--the dark green leaves
of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded
with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth,--the bending
sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me,
swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind,--the tiny scarlet cups of
moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a
spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood,--the shrinking and
wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom,--every
half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite
rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence,--the rough
seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks,--the light that
pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson:
all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the
great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its
ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.

At length the minuteness of Nature oppressed me. The thousand odors,
spicy, acrid, aromatic, honeyed, that an autumnal dew expressed from
every herb, through that sense that is the slave of association,
recalled my youth, my boyhood, the free and careless hours I knew no
more, when, on just such mornings of hazy and splendid autumns, I had
just so lain on the fern-beds, heedless of every beauty that haunted the
woods, full of fresh life, rejoicing in dog and gun and rod as no man
ever rejoices in title-deeds or stocks or hoarded gold. The reminiscence
stung me to the quick; I could endure no more. Rising, I went on, and
through the oak-wood came to the brink of the river, and in a vague
weariness sat down upon the massive water-wall, and looked over into
the dark brown stream. It was deep below me; a little above were clear
shallows, where the water-spider pursued its toil of no result, and
cast upon the yellow sand beneath a shadow that was not a shadow, but,
refracted from the broken surface, spots of