In spots like these it is we prize
Our memory, feel that she hath eyes:
Then why should I be loth to stir?
I feel this place was made for her;
To give new pleasure like the past,
Continued long as life shall last.
Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart,
Sweet Highland Girl, from thee to part;
For I, methinks, till I grow old,
As fair before me shall behold,
As I do now, the cabin small,
The lake, the bay, the waterfall,
And thee, the spirit of them all!

I had finished, and the poem had been to me like a draught of the fresh
spring-water which I had sipped so often of late as it dropped from the
cup of some large green leaf.

Then I heard her gentle voice, like the first tone of the organ, which
wakens us from our dreamy devotion, and she said:

"Thus I desire you to love me, and thus the old Hofrath loves me, and
thus in one way or another we should all love and believe in each
other. But the world, although I scarcely know it, does not seem to
understand this love and faith, and, on this earth, where we could have
lived so happily, men have made existence very wretched.

"It must have been otherwise of old, else how could Homer have created
the lovely, wholesome, tender picture of Nausikaa? Nausikaa loves
Ulysses at the first glance. She says at once to her female friends:
'Oh, that I could call such a man my spouse, and that it were his
destiny to remain here.' She was even too modest to appear in public
at the same time with him, and she says, in his presence, that if she
should bring such a handsome and majestic stranger home, the people
would say, she may have taken him for a husband. How simple and
natural all this is! But when she heard that he was going home to his
wife and children, no murmur escaped her. She disappears from our
sight, and we feel that she carried the picture of the handsome and
majestic stranger a long time afterward in her breast, with silent and
joyful admiration. Why do not our poets know this love--this joyful
acknowledgment, this calm abnegation? A later poet would have made a
womanish Werter out of Nausikaa, for the reason that love with us is
nothing more than the prelude to the comedy, or the tragedy, of
marriage. Is it true there is no longer any other love? Has the
fountain of this pure happiness wholly dried up? Are men only
acquainted with the intoxicating draught, and no longer with the
invigorating well-spring of love?"

At th