, or rapt silence, when more and more with each hour unfolded
before me that nature, so tenderly coy, so cheerful though serious, so
attuned by simple cares to affection, yet so filled, from soft musings
and solitude, with a poetry that gave grace to duties the homeliest,
setting life's trite things to Music! Here nature and fortune concurred
alike,--equal in birth and pretensions, similar in tastes and in
objects, loving the healthful activity of purpose, but content to find
it around us, neither envying the wealthy nor vying with the great, each
framed by temper to look on the bright side of life and find founts of
delight and green spots fresh with verdure where eyes but accustomed
to cities could see but the sands and the mirage. While afar, as man's
duty, I had gone through the travail that, in wrestling with fortune,
gives pause to the heart to recover its losses and know the value of
love in its graver sense of life's earnest realities, Heaven had reared,
at the thresholds of home, the young tree that should cover the roof
with its blossoms and embalm with its fragrance the daily air of my
being.

It had been the joint prayer of those kind ones I left that such might
be my reward, and each had contributed, in his or her several way, to
fit that fair life for the ornament and joy of the one that now asked to
guard and to cherish it. From Roland came that deep, earnest honor,--a
man's in its strength, and a woman's in its delicate sense of
refinement. From Roland, that quick taste for all things noble in poetry
and lovely in nature,--the eye that sparkled to read how Bayard stood
alone at the bridge and saved an army; or wept over the page that told
how the dying Sidney put the bowl from his burning lips. Is that too
masculine a spirit for some? Let each please himself. Give me the
woman who can echo all thoughts that are noblest in men! And that
eye, too,--like Roland's,--could pause to note each finer mesh in the
wonderful web-work of beauty. No landscape to her was the same yesterday
and to-day: a deeper shade from the skies could change the face of the
moors; the springing up of fresh wild-flowers, the very song of some
bird unheard before, lent variety to the broad rugged heath. Is that
too simple a source of pleasure for some to prize? Be it so to those who
need the keen stimulants that cities afford. But if we were to pass all
our hours in those scenes, it was something to have the tastes which own
no monoto