The moon comes out, and gleaming through the clouds, braids its light fantastic bow upon the waters. You feel calmer as the night deepens. The darkness softens you; it hangs--like the pall that shrouds your mother's corpse--low and heavily to your heart. It helps your inward grief with some outward show. It makes the earth a mourner; it makes the flashing water-drops so many attendant mourners. It makes the Great Fall itself a mourner, and its roar a requiem!
The pleasure of travel is cut short. To one person of the little company of fellow-voyagers you bid adieu with regret; pride, love, and hope point toward her, while all the gentler affections stray back to the broken home. Her smile of parting is very gracious, but it is not, after all, such a smile as your warm heart pines for.
Ten days after, you are walking toward the old homestead with such feelings as it never called up before. In the days of boyhood there were triumphant thoughts of the gladness and the pride with which, when grown to the stature of manhood, you would come back to that little town of your birth. As you have bent with your dreamy resolutions over the tasks of the cloister life, swift thoughts have flocked on you of the proud step, and prouder heart, with which you would one day greet the old acquaintances of boyhood; and you have regaled yourself on the jaunty manner with which you would meet old Dr. Bidlow, and the patronizing air with which you would address the pretty, blue-eyed Madge.
It is late afternoon when you come in sight of the tall sycamores that shade your home; you shudder now, lest you may meet any whom you once knew. The first keen grief of youth seeks little of the sympathy of companions: it lies--with a sensitive man--bounded within the narrowest circles of the heart. They only who hold the key to its innermost recesses can speak consolation. Years will make a change;--as the Summer grows in fierce heats, the balminess of the violet banks of Spring is lost in the odors of a thousand flowers;--the heart, as it gains in age, loses freshness, but wins breadth.
----Throw a pebble into the brook at its source, and the agitation is terrible, and the ripples chafe madly their narrowed banks;--throw in a pebble when the brook has become a river, and you see a few circles, widening and widening and widening, until they are lost in the gentle every-day murmur of its life!