lying wide around me, unbroken, to
the dark horizon.

If my grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so. I mourned for my
child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so young. I mourned for him
who might have won the love and admiration of thousands, as he had won
mine long ago. I mourned for the broken heart that had found rest in the
stormy sea; and for the wandering remnants of the simple home, where I
had heard the night-wind blowing, when I was a child.

From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no hope
of ever issuing again. I roamed from place to place, carrying my burden
with me everywhere. I felt its whole weight now; and I drooped beneath
it, and I said in my heart that it could never be lightened.

When this despondency was at its worst, I believed that I should die.
Sometimes, I thought that I would like to die at home; and actually
turned back on my road, that I might get there soon. At other times, I
passed on farther away,--from city to city, seeking I know not what, and
trying to leave I know not what behind.

It is not in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary phases of
distress of mind through which I passed. There are some dreams that can
only be imperfectly and vaguely described; and when I oblige myself to
look back on this time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream.
I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces,
cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets--the
old abiding places of History and Fancy--as a dreamer might; bearing my
painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they
fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the
night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it--as
at last I did, thank Heaven!--and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to
dawn.

For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my
mind. Some blind reasons that I had for not returning home--reasons then
struggling within me, vainly, for more distinct expression--kept me
on my pilgrimage. Sometimes, I had proceeded restlessly from place to
place, stopping nowhere; sometimes, I had lingered long in one spot. I
had had no purpose, no sustaining soul within me, anywhere.

I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great
passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the
by-ways of the mountains. If those awful solitudes had