re
castles until you can people them with men! In an excess of pride you
even take umbrage at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that
engrossing tenderness of which you feel yourself to be capable. Love
shall henceforth be dead, and you will live boldly without it.

----Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning
the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride--the winter is
come early! But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or
an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon
our ungrateful heads.

* * * * *

Well it is even so, that the passionate dreams of youth break up and
wither. Vanity becomes tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields
to the riper judgment of manhood,--even as the August heats pass on,
and over, into the genial glow of a September sun. There is a strong
growth in the struggles against mortified pride; and then only does the
youth get an ennobling consciousness of that manhood which is dawning in
him, when he has fairly surmounted those puny vexations which a wounded
vanity creates.

Now your heart is driven home; and that cherished place, where so little
while ago you wore your vanities with an air that mocked even your
grief, and that subdued your better nature, seems to stretch toward you
over long miles of distance its wings of love, and to welcome back to
the sister's and the father's heart, not the self-sufficient and
vaunting youth, but the brother and son--the schoolboy Clarence. Like a
thirsty child, you stray in thought to that fountain of cheer, and live
again--your vanity crushed, your wild hope broken--in the warm and
natural affections of the boyish home.

Clouds weave the SUMMER into the season of AUTUMN; and
YOUTH rises from dashed hopes into the stature of a
MAN.

_AUTUMN;_

OR,

_THE DREAMS OF MANHOOD._

_DREAMS OF MANHOOD._

_Autumn._

There are those who shudder at the approach of Autumn, and who feel a
light grief stealing over their spirits, like an October haze, as the
evening shadows slant sooner, and longer, over the face of an ending
August day.

But is not Autumn the Manhood of the year? Is it not the ripest of the
seasons? Do not proud flowers blossom,--the golden-rod, the orchis, the
dahlia, and the bloody cardinal of the swamp-lands?

The fruits too are golden, hanging heavy from the tasked trees. The
fields of maize s