have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be,
will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
wrought upon him from all these sources. My conscience, however, does
not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit. How
narrow-how shallow and scanty too--is the stream of thought that has
been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim
emotions, ideas, and associations which swell around me from that
portion of my existence! How little have I told! and of that little,
how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it
exclusively my own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with
me, through the inner passages of my being? and have we groped
together into all its chambers and examined their treasures or their
rubbish? Not so. We have been standing on the greensward, but just
within the cavern's mouth, where the common sunshine is free to
penetrate, and where every footstep is therefore free to come. I have
appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities save such as are diffused
among us all. So far as I am a man of really individual attributes I
veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, one of those supremely
hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried,
with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.

Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no
measurement of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of
life's ocean, three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as
the breezy sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a
still valley. Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the