light his pipe withal; but they told him little as regarded this boy's
internal state, being mere echoes, and very lugubrious ones, of poetic
strains that were floating about in the atmosphere of that day, long
before any now remembered bard had begun to sing. But there were the
rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind within the boy, if its
subsequent culture should be such as the growth of that delicate flower
requires; a brooding habit taking outward things into itself and
imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had lain there
awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself, and
became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own. He
lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the
peculiarity of his situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches
and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery,
keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the
air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps a
real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that
visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns,
and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful
threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and
wandered so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on
the corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter,
and the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great
ugly spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served
to remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was
all that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so
much younger than he, was influenced by the same circumstances, and
still more by himself, so that, as far as he could impart himself to
her, he led her hand in hand through the same dream-scenery amid which
he strayed himself. They knew not another child in town; the grim
Doctor was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion had its