litter of the joyous sunbeams.

Nor were the smiles rare or forced, though not now as habitual as in
those days of youth unalloyed by calamity, and unsunned by passion,
which, once departed, never can return in this world.

The morning of the young lord's arrival passed gloomily enough; it was
the very height of summer, it is true, and the sun was shining his
brightest over field and tree and tower, and every thing appeared to
partake of the delicious influence of the charming weather, and to put
on its blithest and most radiant apparel.

Never perhaps had the fine grounds, with their soft mossy sloping
lawns, and tranquil brimful waters and shadowy groves of oak and elm,
great immemorial trees, looked lovelier than they did that day to
greet their long absent master.

But, inasmuch as nothing in this world is more delightful, nothing
more unmixed in its means of conveying pleasure, than the return,
after long wanderings in foreign climes, among vicissitudes and cares,
and sorrows, to an unchanged and happy home, where the same faces are
assembled to smile on your late return which wept at your departure,
so nothing can be imagined sadder or more depressing to the spirit
than so returning to find all things inanimate unchanged, or if
changed, more beautiful and brighter for the alteration, but all the
living, breathing, sentient creatures--the creatures whose memory has
cheered our darkest days of sorrow, whose love we desire most to find
unaltered--gone, never to return, swallowed by the cold grave, deaf,
silent, unresponsive to our fond affection.

Such was St. Renan's return to the house of his fathers. Until a few
short days before he had pictured to himself his father's moderate and
manly pleasure, his mother's holy kiss and chastened rapture at
beholding once again, at clasping to her happy bosom, the son, whom
she sent forth a boy, returned a man worthy the pride of the most
ambitious parent.

All this Raoul de St. Renan had anticipated, and bitter, bitter was
the pang when he perceived all this gay and glad anticipation thrown
to the winds irreparably.

There was not a room in the old house, not a view from a single
window, not a tree in the noble park, not a winding curve of a
trout-stream glimmering through the coppices, but was in some way
connected with his tenderest and most sacred recollections, but had a
memory of pleasant hours attached to it, but recalled the sound of the
kindliest and dearest