settling upon you heavily and solemnly in the very fields where you
wanton to-day?

This American life of ours is a tortuous and shifting impulse. It brings
Age back from years of wandering to totter in the hamlet of its birth;
and it scatters armies of ripe manhood to bleach far-away shores with
their bones.

That Providence, whose eye and hand are the spy and the executioner of
the Fateful changes of our life, may bring you back in Manhood, or in
Age, to this mountain home of New England; and that very willow yonder,
which your fancy now makes the graceful mourner of your leave, may one
day shadow mournfully your grave!




VII.

_The Country Church._


The country church is a square old building of wood without paint or
decoration, and of that genuine Puritanic stamp which is now fast giving
way to Greek porticos and to cockney towers. It stands upon a hill, with
a little churchyard in its rear, where one or two sickly-looking trees
keep watch and ward over the vagrant sheep that graze among the graves.
Bramble-bushes seem to thrive on the bodies below, and there is no
flower in the little yard, save a few golden-rods, which flaunt their
gaudy inodorous color under the lee of the northern wall.