have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my
condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the
antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening
for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising
and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful
airs as might be stirring--the peculiar solemnity of the hours
succeeding to sunset--the glory of the dying day--the gorgeousness
which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian
islands from which my father was returning--the knowledge that he
returned only to die--the almighty pomp in which this great idea of
Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart--the corresponding
pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life,
rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries
that seemed even _more_ solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and
trophies of mortality,--all this chorus of restless images, or of
suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been
fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar
of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams.
This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's
image to me as a personal reality; otherwise he would have been for
me a bare _nominis umbra_. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a
sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose
of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his
waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour
of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious
conversation with some imaginary visitors.

My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen,
but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an
early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His