his carpetbag on his arm, inquired at once where Ernest dwelt, and was
resolved to be accepted as his guest.

Approaching the door, he there found the good old man, holding a volume
in his hand, which alternately he read, and then, with a finger between
the leaves, looked lovingly at the Great Stone Face.

'Good evening,' said the poet. 'Can you give a traveller a night's
lodging?'

'Willingly,' answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, 'Methinks I
never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger.'

The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked
together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and
the wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts
and feelings gushed up with such a natural feeling, and who made great
truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had
been so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in
the fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside;
and, dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the
sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm
of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,
was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out
of his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with
shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men
instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained
alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful
music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor
distinguished his own share from the other's. They led one another, as