y. He
had been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had
just left--with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the
magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was
the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's
world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching
silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of
life. What a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said our
good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked
for a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, half
personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had
together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind
as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had
described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my
friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious
things, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change with
us--"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by
ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the
child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape
from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of
lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more of
it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and
the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they
had not been lived a thousand years before,--listened like a child to a
story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I
had made, after that April morning, year by year.

* * * * *

"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men
a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human
fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea,
the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful
and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from
eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense
of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity
merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too
impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates
our faculties. Rather some sign of