but often as I have paused at this spot,
and gazed upon this landscape, a likeness to the scenes of my childish
life, which it now seems to me to present, never occurred to me before.
Yes, yonder, in that cottage, with the sycamores in front, and the
orchard extending behind, till its boundary, as we now stand, seems lost
among the woodland, I could fancy that I looked upon my father's home.
The clump of trees that lies yonder to the right could cheat me readily
to the belief that I saw the little grove in which, enamoured with the
first passion of study, I was wont to pore over the thrice-read book
through the long summer days;--a boy,--a thoughtful boy; yet, oh! how
happy! What worlds appeared then to me, to open in every page! how
exhaustless I thought the treasures and the hopes of life! and beautiful
on the mountain tops seemed to me the steps of Knowledge! I did not
dream of all that the musing and lonely passion that I nursed was to
entail upon me. There, in the clefts of the valley, or the ridges of the
hill, or the fragrant course of the stream, I began already to win its
history from the herb or flower; I saw nothing, that I did not long
to unravel its secrets; all that the earth nourished ministered to one
desire:--and what of low or sordid did there mingle with that desire?
The petty avarice, the mean ambition, the debasing love, even the heat,
the anger, the fickleness, the caprice of other men, did they allure
or bow down my nature from its steep and solitary eyrie? I lived but to
feed my mind; wisdom was my thirst, my dream, my aliment, my sole fount
and sustenance of life. And have I not sown the whirlwind and reaped the
wind? The glory of my youth is gone, my veins are chilled, my frame
is bowed, my heart is gnawed with cares, my nerves are unstrung as
a loosened bow: and what, after all, is my gain? Oh, God! what is my
gain?"

"Eugene, dear, dear Eugene!" murmured Madeline soothingly, and wrestling
with her tears, "is not your gain great? is it no triumph that you
stand, while yet young, almost alone in the world, for success in all
that you have attempted?"

"And what," exclaimed Aram, breaking in upon her, "what is this world
which we ransack, but a stupendous charnel-house? Every thing that we
deem most lovely, ask its origin?--Decay! When we rifle nature, and
collect wisdom, are we not like the hags of old, culling simples from
the rank grave, and extracting sorceries from the rotting bones of
th