he is
born. There is a double proportion of oxygen in the New World air. The
chemists have not found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs
have long since made the discovery.

Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his possibilities of
happiness in one direction, and he felt that there was a certain grandeur
in the recompense of working out his defeated instincts through the
ambitious medium of his noble art. Had not Pharaohs chosen it to
proclaim their longings for immortality, Caesars their passion for pomp
and luxury, and priests to symbolize their conceptions of the heavenly
mansions? His dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the
best possessions of youth. Had he but been free, or mated with a nature
akin to his own, he would have felt himself as truly the heir of creation
as any young man that lived. But his lot was cast, and his youth had all
the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood. In the region of
his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which
his home life could never give him.

Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
but was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not
exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
between them to dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a
partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried
his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing
them to her. "Would that you were with us at this delightful
season," she wrote in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not
repine. Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,

"Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
For absence makes thee doubly dear;
Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
'T is night without the orb of day!'"

The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and promising
friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The letter, it is
unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can tell her love, or
other matter of interest, over and over again in as many forms as another
poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing the musical changes of
"In Memoriam."

The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They
convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come
to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to
keep him in