ur kind, touched with a dearer domestic tenderness,
or with a sweet benevolence that seemed to our ardent fancy to embrace
the dwellers in the uttermost regions of the earth. No secret of
pleasure or pain--of joy or grief--of fear or hope--had our heart to
withhold or conceal from Emilius Godfrey. He saw it as it beat within
our bosom, with all its imperfections--may we venture to say, with all
its virtues. A repented folly--a confessed fault--a sin for which we
were truly contrite--a vice flung from us with loathing and with
shame--in such moods as these, happier were we to see his serious and
his solemn smile, than when in mirth and merriment we sat by his side in
the social hour on a knoll in the open sunshine, and the whole school
were in ecstasies to hear tales and stories from his genius, even like a
flock of birds chirping in their joy all newly-alighted in a vernal
land. In spite of that difference in our years--or oh! say rather
because that very difference did touch the one heart with tenderness and
the other with reverence, how often did we two wander, like elder and
younger brother, in the sunlight and moonlight solitudes! Woods--into
whose inmost recesses we should have quaked alone to penetrate, in his
company were glad as gardens, through their most awful umbrage; and
there was beauty in the shadows of the old oaks. Cataracts--in whose
lonesome thunder, as it pealed into those pitchy pools, we durst not by
ourselves have faced the spray--in his presence, dinn'd with a merry
music in the desert, and cheerful was the thin mist they cast sparkling
up into the air. Too severe for our uncompanioned spirit, then easily
overcome with awe, was the solitude of those remote inland lochs. But as
we walked with him along the winding shores, how passing sweet the calm
of both blue depths--how magnificent the white-crested waves tumbling
beneath the black thunder-cloud! More beautiful, because our eyes gazed
on it along with his, at the beginning or the ending of some sudden
storm, the Apparition of the Rainbow! Grander in its wildness, that
seemed to sweep at once all the swinging and stooping woods to our ear,
because his too listened, the concerto by winds and waves played at
midnight, when not one star was in the sky. With him we first followed
the Falcon in her flight--he showed us on the Echo-cliff the Eagle's
eyry. To the thicket he led us where lay couched the lovely-spotted Doe,
or showed us the mild-eyed creatu