Whatever pallor or shadow lined my face was no stranger
there at that hour. The gray morning passed away; the village on the
hill sent down busy sounds of labor and cheer; flies buzzed on the sunny
pane, doors clicked and slammed in the house, fires crackled behind the
shining fire-dogs. I went to the library,--_the first breath of
air_ had--_dissipated it_! What a mockery! I went away,--out of the
house,--on, anywhere. Dry leaves rustled in my path and sent up a faint
aromatic breath as they were crushed in the undried dew; squirrels
chattered in the wood; here and there a dropping nut stirred the silence
with deliberate fall, or an unseen grouse whirred through the birches at
my approaching step. The way was trodden and led me by gradual slope and
native windings through the dull red oaks downward to the river. Once on
the path, a low cluster of sweet fern attracted me;--strange assertion
of human personality, that in the deepest grief a man knows and notices
the trivial features of Nature with microscopic fidelity! that the
veining of a leaf or the pencilling of a blossom will attract the eye
that no majesty or beauty of unwonted manifestation could light with
one appreciative spark! Is it that the injured and indignant soul
so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says,
unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life
no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether
extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the
outer tenement,--darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its
approaches with seas to drown,--there is that within that God alone can
vanquish,--yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the
fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the
leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about
me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every
leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight,--the dark green leaves
of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded
with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth,--the bending
sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me,
swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind,--the tiny scarlet cups of
moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a
spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood,--the shrinking and
wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom,--every
half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite
rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence,--the rough
seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks,--the light that
pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson:
all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the
great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its
ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.
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