There Is A Majestic Grandeur In Tranquillity.

The Scholar Only Knows How Dear These Silent, Yet Eloquent, Companions Of Pure Thoughts And Innocent Hours Become In The Season Of Adversity. When All That Is Worldly Turns To Dross Around Us, These Only Retain Their Steady Value.

Luxury Spreads Its Ample Board Before Their Eyes; But They Are Excluded From The Banquet. Plenty Revels Over The Fields; But Theyare Starving In The Midst Of Its Abundance: The Whole Wilderness Has Blossomed Into A Garden; But They Feel As Reptiles That Infest It.

How We Delight To Build Our Recollections Upon Some Basis Of Reality,--a Place, A Country, A Local Habitation! How The Events Of Life, As We Look Back Upon Them, Have Grown Into The Well-remembered Background Of The Places Where They Fell Upon Us! Here Is Some Sunny Garden Or Summer Lane, Beautified And Canonized Forever, With The Flood Of A Great Joy; And Here Are Dim And Silent Places,--rooms Always Shadowed And Dark To Us, Whatever They May Be To Others,--where Distress Or Death Came Once, And Since Then Dwells Forevermore.

There Are Certain Half-dreaming Moods Of Mind In Which We Naturally Steal Away From Noise And Glare, And Seek Some Quiet Haunt Where We May Indulge Our Reveries And Build Our Air Castles Undisturbed.

It Was, As I Have Said, A Fine Autumnal Day; The Sky Was Clear And Serene, And Nature Wore That Rich And Golden Livery Which We Always Associate With The Idea Of Abundance. The Forests Had Put On Their Sober Brown And Yellow, While Some Trees Of The Tendered Kind Had Been Nipped By The Frosts Into Brilliant Dyes Of Orange, Purple, And Scarlet.