ssion, as with one who, having narrowly
escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing for grateful tears in
just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till the end of days.

He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,
sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to north
and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with their living
trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the desk"--fields
fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of which the present
writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day, to have heard the
cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of things is certainly
humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where the child goes
a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt to respond to the
brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference between rain and
sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly; those quaint
suburban pastorals gather a certain quality of grandeur from the
background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent
of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 86: From "Appreciations," 1889.]

[Footnote 87: Macabre: very grim.]

[Footnote 88: Opus operatum (a phrase from Catholic theology): the work
performed through the sacraments--baptism, confirmation, etc.--the
efficacy of which is not dependent on the participants.]

DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT[89]

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

That very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four venerable
friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded
gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a
withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow Wycherly. They were all
melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose
greatest misfortune it was, that they were not long ago in their graves.
Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant,
but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better
than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his
health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had
given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other
torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne