of civility and grace in the
coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the
school-house door;--but to-day he comes running into the entry, and
meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help
her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him
infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he
runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little
neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each
other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging,
half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into the country
shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an
hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the
village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and
without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out
in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly
do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable,
confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar
and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced
at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and
other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy
wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find
a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as
incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for
the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But
now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For
persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the
debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of
love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught
derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture
falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although
a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and putting us
quite beside ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the
remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a
wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it
may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have
no fairer page in their life's book th