s had infected me, and that I was
dying to ascertain their truth; in a word, that his hopeful nephew was
fully bent on going to town. My uncle first stared, then swore, then
paused, then looked at his leg, drew up his stocking, frowned, whistled,
and told me at last to talk to him about it another time. Now, for
my part, I think there are only two classes of people in the world
authorized to put one off to "another time,"--prime ministers and
creditors; accordingly, I would not take my uncle's dismissal. I had not
read plays, studied philosophy, and laid snares for the Abbe Montreuil
without deriving some little wisdom from my experience; so I took to
teasing, and a notable plan it is too! Whoever has pursued it may guess
the result. My uncle yielded, and that day fortnight was fixed for my
departure.

Oh! with what transport did I look forward to the completion of my
wishes, the goal of my ambition! I hastened forth; I hurried into the
woods; I sang out in the gladness of my heart, like a bird released;
I drank in the air with a rapturous sympathy in its freedom; my step
scarcely touched the earth, and my whole frame seemed ethereal, elated,
exalted by the vivifying inspiration of my hopes. I paused by a
little streamlet, which, brawling over stones and through unpenetrated
thicknesses of wood, seemed, like confined ambition, not the less
restless for its obscurity.

"Wild brooklet," I cried, as my thoughts rushed into words, "fret on,
our lot is no longer the same; your wanderings and your murmurs are
wasted in solitude and shade; your voice dies and re-awakes, but without
an echo; your waves spread around their path neither fertility nor
terror; their anger is idle, and their freshness is lavished on a
sterile soil; the sun shines in vain for you, through these unvarying
wastes of silence and gloom; Fortune freights not your channel with her
hoarded stores, and Pleasure ventures not her silken sails upon your
tide; not even the solitary idler roves beside you, to consecrate with
human fellowship your melancholy course; no shape of beauty bends
over your turbid waters, or mirrors in your breast the loveliness that
hallows earth. Lonely and sullen, through storm or sunshine, you repine
along your desolate way, and only catch, through the matted boughs that
darken over you, the beams of the wan stars, which, like human hopes,
tremble upon your breast, and are broken, even before they fade, by the
very turbulence of th