esbyterian sect, I took my leave, quite unconscious that I had
said anything out of the common, for all I meant was to give my reasons
for going back to the Episcopal Church. As for Professor Dodd, he had
given me up from the very first interview to follow my idols as I
pleased, only just throwing in argument enough to keep me well going. He
would have been the last man on earth to throw down such a marvellous
fairy castle, goblin-built and elfin-tenanted, from whose windows rang
AEolian harps, and which was lit by night with undying Rosicrucian lamps,
to erect on its ruin a plain brick, Old School Presbyterian slated
chapel. I was far more amusing as I was, and so I was let alone.

I had passed my examination about the end of June, and I was to remain in
Princeton until the autumn, reading under a tutor, in the hope of being
able to join the Sophomore class when the college course should begin.
There I was utterly alone, and rambled by myself in the woods. I
believed myself to be a very good Christian in those days; but I was
really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or Old Nature heathen
as ever lived in Etrusco-Roman or early German days. A book very dear to
my heart at that time was the _Curiositez Inouyes_ of Gaffarel (Trollope
was under the impression that he was the only man in Europe who ever read
it), in which there is an exquisite theory that the stars of heaven in
their courses and the lines of winding rivers and bending corn, the
curves of shells and minerals, rocks and trees, yes, of all the shapes of
all created things, form the trace and letters of a stupendous _writing_
or characters spread all over the universe, which writing becomes little
by little legible to the one who by communion with Nature and earnest
faith seeks to penetrate the secret. I had found in the lonely woods a
small pond by a high rock, where I often sat in order to attain this
blessed illumination, and if I did not get quite so far as I hoped, I did
in reality attain to a deep unconscious familiarity with birds and leafy
shades, still waters, and high rising trees; in short, with all the sweet
solemnity of sylvan nature, which has ever since influenced all my life.
I mean this not in the second-hand way in which it is so generally
understood, but as a _real_ existence in itself, so earnestly felt that I
was but little short of talking with elfin beings or seeing fairies
flitting over flowers. Those who explain everything