and the long looking at death, and above all, the Christian's
hope, enable us one by one to break off the dearest ties, and to renounce
whatever we most love on earth. And so my young friend in good time
emerged from the cloud which obscured his prospects, and saw clearly
beyond the vale. It is not long since, being well assured that his fate
was inevitable, he expressed a desire, which he carried into execution, to
visit once more his well-loved haunts, and take a solemn farewell of them
all. As one grasps the hand of a friend at parting, he looked his last at
things which were inanimate. He rambled in the deep, dark groves whither
he had so often gone in health, to enjoy their Gothic grandeur, to breathe
the spirit of the religion they inspire, or to murmur in their deepest
shades the accents of his pure and passionate love. He inscribed his name
for the last time upon the smooth bark of a tree; then leaving them
forever, as he emerged into the gay meadows, he turned to me with tears
and said:

'Ye woods, and wilds, whose melancholy gloom
Accords with my soul's sadness, and draws forth
The voice of sorrow from my bursting heart!'

He clambered the steep hill-side, and sinking exhausted beneath a smitten
tree, enjoyed the picturesqueness of the scene; the meadows, the streams,
the pasture-grounds, the dappled herds, the sereneness of the summer
skies, cleft by the wing of the musical lark, in all their purity of blue.
He sat beside the sea-shore, and watched the big billows breaking and
bursting at his feet; and as he looked where the waters and the sky met
together in the far horizon, he exclaimed, 'Now indeed do I long to fly
away!' Then he returned to his pillow, never to go forth again. 'I shall
die,' he said, 'when the season is in its prime and glory; when the fields
are green and the trees leafy; and the sunlight shall shimmer down through
the branches where the birds sing over my grave.' Then casting a look at
his books, where they stood neatly arranged on the well-filled shelves, he
lamented that he had not time to garner half the stores of a beautiful
literature; to satisfy his perpetual thirst; to drink to the full at the
'pure wells of English undefiled.' There were the Greek poets, whom he
would have more intimately cherished, (he had been lately absorbed in the
sublimity of the 'Prometheus Vinctus;') there was the great master and
anatomizer of the human heart, who knew how to detail the springs of