p your affections and your duties; you build hopes
with fairy scenery, and away they all go, tossing like the relentless
waters to the deep gulf that gapes a hideous welcome! You sigh at your
weakness of heart, or of endeavor, and your sighs float out into the
breeze, that rises ever from the shock of the waves, and whirl,
empty-handed, to Heaven. You avow high purposes, and clench them with
round utterance; and your voice, like a sparrow's, is caught up in the
roar of the fall, and thrown at you from the cliffs, and dies away in
the solemn thunders of nature. Great thoughts of life come over you--of
its work and destiny--of its affections and duties, and roll down
swift--like the river--into the deep whirl of doubt and danger. Other
thoughts, grander and stronger, like the continuing rush of waters, come
over you, and knit your purposes together with their weight, and crush
you to exultant tears, and then leap, shattered and broken, from the
very edge of your intent into mists of fear!

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 add