The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.- In that little court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long, -- in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower shores, - up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions, -where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old "Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight, - sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of their harmless stroll, - the patulous fage, in the Professor's classic dialect, - the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase, - [stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before us,] -- and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic, - dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes, - in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region, - suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest, - in that home where seven blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer, -- in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany, - full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom, - in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.
This long articulated sigh of reminiscences, - this calenture which shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers, - is for that friend of mine who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the Charles.
- Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress? - Why, no, - of course not.I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes.You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?
- What did I say to the schoolmistress? - Permit me one moment.Idon't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is NULLUM TUI NEGOTII.
When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.
EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
(TO BE BURNED UNREAD.)
I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites confidence and expansive utterance.I have been low-spirited and listless, lately, - it is coffee, I think, - (Iobserve that which is bought READY-GROUND never affects the head,)- and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.
There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.
There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest ocean-buried inscription!
- Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no! - Yet what is this which has been shaping itself in my soul? - Is it a thought? - is it a dream? - is it a PASSION? - Then I know what comes next.
