hones and mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of which
springs all that now appears so young and new? Sweet must have been
the springtime of Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its decay
upon the virgin turf and no former experience had ripened into
summer and faded into autumn in the hearts of its inhabitants! That
was a world worth living in. O then murmurer, it is out of the very
wantonness of such a life that then feignest these idle
lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the first-
created inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered
mansion, and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a
gray clergyman's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all
these outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the
renewing power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this
power,--should the withered leaves, and the rotten branches, and the
moss-covered house, and the ghost of the gray past ever become its
realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely its faint
dream,--then let it pray to be released from earth. It will need
the air of heaven to revive its pristine energies.

What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of
black-ash and balm of Gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have
our feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so
industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone
wall, and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially
around the southern doorstep,--a locality which seems particularly
favorable to its growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over
and wave in the wind. I observe that several weeds--and most
frequently a plant that stains the fingers with its yellow juice--
have survived and retained their freshness and sap throughout the
winter. One knows not how they have deserved such an exception from