years. With the same painful feeling of boundlessness,
of vastness that will not be grasped by the imagination, that one feels in
sailing on the ocean, there is also an air of still, stern desolation
brooding upon the plain. It may be that at some former day, the punishment
of fire swept over it, consuming its towering offspring, and laying bare
and scorching its bosom; and now the proud sufferer, naked and chained,
endures the summer's heat and the winter's storms, with no sighing herbage
or wailing tree to tell to the winds its wo.

A single snow-white cloud slumbers and floats far up in the heavens; the
moon is gliding slowly down the western arch; and the vast dome, studded
with innumerable brilliants, 'fretted with golden fires,' rests its
northern and western edge on the plain, its southern on blue
mountain-tops, its eastern on the forests, and shuts us, the river, the
prairie, the moon and I, together and alone. And here will we dwell
together alone! Sweet companions will ye be to me; and standing here on
this eminence, I promise to love you. I promise to come here often, and to
hold communion with you. I will put away all thoughts of sorrow, all
swellings of bitterness, from my mind. Contentedly, calmly, unheedingly,
will we let the years pass by; for what will it matter to us? Oh! ye are
dear to me! Your _voice_ is not heard, yet comes there constantly to my
ear the murmur of your song. You speak to me in music and poetry; and
while I listen, my thoughts revert only with shuddering to the vain world
I have left behind. Thus let us converse always. This vaulted firmament
which shuts down upon us now, let it be immoveable, and enclose us
forever; here let the wanderings of the wanderer cease, and here will we
live together and alone!

* * * * *

And we _have_ lived here many years. The lessons of my constant companions
have calmed and elevated me to a gentler and better spirit. From them I
have learned humility as well as self-reliance; while from the history of
the actions and thoughts of men in past ages, I have learned perhaps
something of the machinery of human nature. The forms of the noblest of
preceding generations, and the shapes of beauty which their imaginations
have conceived and made to live, visit me at my bidding. But among all the
pictures that daily rise up before my eyes, the brightest, the most
beautiful, the most loved, are the sweet faces of the friends of my ea