--In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long, -
- in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes
loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord,
swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it
goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious
oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows
the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford
and all along its lower shores,--up in that caravansary on the
banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the
jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,--
where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the
hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the
Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old
"Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of
sight,--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried
them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in
cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the
terminus of their harmless stroll,--the patulous fage, in the
Professor's classic dialect,--the spreading beech, in more familiar
phrase,--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not
done yet, and we have another long journey before us,] -
- and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic,--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid
orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes,--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the
tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the
winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North,
the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy
region,--suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden
away beneath the leaves of the forest,--in that home where seven
blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven
golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer, -
- in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious,
yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,--full of
great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,--in all these
summer or winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.
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