one of Milton; the translated Ossian; Thomson's Seasons--with a few
more; and from the reading of these, among other results, had
arisen this--that, in the midst of his enjoyment of the world
around him, he found himself every now and then sighing after a
lovelier nature than that before his eyes. There he read of
mountains, if not wilder, yet loftier and more savage than his own,
of skies more glorious, of forests of such trees as he knew only
from one or two old engravings in the house, on which he looked
with a strange, inexplicable reverence: he would sometimes wake
weeping from a dream of mountains, or of tossing waters. Once with
his waking eyes he saw a mist afar off, between the hills that
ramparted the horizon, grow rosy after the sun was down, and his
heart filled as with the joy of a new discovery. Around him, it is
true, the waters rushed well from their hills, but their banks had
little beauty. Not merely did the want of trees distress him, but
the nature of their channel; most of them, instead of rushing
through rocks, cut their way only through beds of rough gravel, and
their bare surroundings were desolate without grandeur--almost mean
to eyes that had not yet pierced to the soul of them. Nor had he
yet learned to admire the lucent brown of the bog waters. There
seemed to be in the boy a strain of some race used to a richer
home; and yet all the time the frozen regions of the north drew his
fancy tenfold more than Italy or Egypt.

His name was Cosmo, a name brought from Italy by one of the line
who had sold his sword and fought for strangers. Not a few of the
younger branches of the family had followed the same evil
profession, and taken foreign pay--chiefly from poverty and
prejudice combined, but not a little in some cases from the inborn
love of fighting that seems to characterize the Celt. The last