local affections, and, who, when absent, has brooded in sorrow over the
memory of his native hills and valleys, his lakes and mountains--the
rivers, where he hunted the otter and snared the trout, and who has
never revisited them, even in his dreams, without such strong emotions
as caused him to wake with his eyelashes steeped in tears--when such a
person, full of enthusiastic affection and a strong imagination,
returns to his native place after a long absence, under the peculiar
circumstances which we are describing, we need not feel surprised that
the heart of the stranger was filled with such a conflicting tumult of
feelings and recollections as it is utterly impossible to portray.

From the moment the coach passed the bridge we have alluded to, every
hill, and residence, and river, and lake, and meadow, was familiar to
him, and he felt such an individual love and affection for them, as
if they had been capable of welcoming and feeling the presence of the
light-hearted boy, whom they had so often made happy.

In the gairish eye of day, the contemplation of this exquisite landscape
would have been neither so affecting to the heart, nor so beautiful
to the eye. He, the stranger, had not seen it for years, except in his
dreams, and now he saw it in reality, invested with that ideal beauty in
which fancy had adorned it in those visions of the night. The river, as
it gleamed dimly, according as it was lit by the light of the moon,
and the lake, as it shone with pale but visionary beauty, possessed an
interest which the light of day would never have given them. The light,
too, which lay on the sleeping groves, and made the solitary church
spires, as they went along, visible, in dim, but distant beauty, and the
clear outlines of his own mountains, unchanged and unchangeable--all,
all crowded from the force of the recollections with which they were
associated, upon his heart, and he laid himself back, and, for some