thoughts. And the river and my thoughts flowed
on together, the happiest of companions. Like a loitering pilgrim, it
sparkled up to me in recognition as it glided along and bore away my
little frets and fatigues on its bosom. When the work "went well," I
sat in the window-seat, and let my fancies fly whither they
would,--downward to the sea, or upward to the hills that hid the
mountain-cradle of the Merrimack.

The printed regulations forbade us to bring books into the mill, so I
made my window-seat into a small library of poetry, pasting its side
all over with newspaper clippings. In those days we had only weekly
papers, and they had always a "poet's corner," where standard writers
were well represented, with anonymous ones, also. I was not, of course,
much of a critic. I chose my verses for their sentiment, and because I
wanted to commit them to memory; sometimes it was a long poem,
sometimes a hymn, sometimes only a stray verse. Mrs. Hemans sang with
me,--

"Far away, o'er the blue hills far away;"

and I learned and loved her "Better Land," and

"If thou hast crushed a flower,"

and "Kindred Hearts."

I wonder if Miss Landon really did write that fine poem to Mont Blanc
which was printed in her volume, but which sounds so entirely unlike
everything else she wrote! This was one of my window-gems. It ended
with the appeal,--

"Alas for thy past mystery!
For thine untrodden snow!
Nurse of the tempest! hast thou none
To guard thine outraged brow?"

and it contained a stanza that I often now repeat to myself:--

"We know too much: scroll after scroll
Weighs down our weary shelves:
Our only point of ignorance
Is centred in ourselves."

There was one anonymous waif in my collection that I was very fond of.
I have never seen it since, nor ever had the least clue to its
authorship. It stirred me and haunted me; and it often comes back to me
now, in snatches like these:--

"The human mind! That lofty thing,
The palace and the throne
Where Reason sits, a sceptred king,
And breathes his judgment-tone!"

"The human soul! That startling thing,
Mysterious and sublime;
An angel sleeping on the wing,
Worn by the scoffs of time.
From heaven in tears to earth it stole--
That startling thing, the human soul."

I was just beginning, in my questionings as to the meaning of life, to
get glimpses of its true definition from the poets,--that it is love,
serv