gliding by and the foliage rustling over us. And, what was strangest,
neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety of the solemn
woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and the will-of-
the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have come trooping
to share our table-talk and have added their shrill laughter to our
merriment. It was the very spot in which to utter the extremest
nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product of the
mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.

So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray
was Ellery's; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay
glimmering in the fountain's bed and brightened both our faces by the
reflection. Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it
with the mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had
the profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the
knowledge that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days,
to him and me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or
rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical
stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and
conventionalism and fettering influences of man on man. We were so
free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow. When
we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements
of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth
were whispering to us, "Be free! be free!" Therefore along that shady
river-bank there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-
consumed brands, only less sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of
a household fire.