GREEN MOUNTAIN ANNALS A TALE OF TRUTH.

By G. V. H. Forbes, Assistant Editor of Badger's Weekly Messenger.



DEDICATION.

TO the Young Men's Societies of New York, Boston, New Haven, Albany, Utica, and other places, this little volume is humbly dedicated--not with the hope of gaining an extrinsic popularity from so honorable an association--but with the hope of affording the young gentlemen who compose the body guard of virtue and morality in our cities and larger towns an auxiliary that may speak its solemn cautions to the thousands of youthful adventurers who exchange the comparative quiet and innocence of the country for the bustle and seductions of a city.

This volume embodies the leading incidents in the brief history of a young man whose morning sun rose without clouds over the fresh verdure of the hills of Vermont--whose sun went down before the dew of his youth was exhaled, leaving behind a light so lurid and dreary as only to be known hereafter for a beacon fire to warn of storm and danger and ruin. The fear of awakening painful memories in the minds of a circle of friends, who have scarcely ceased to weep over the youth, has led to the concealment of real names, and to a slight disguise in the drapery of narration, which, it is hoped, will not impair the power of this parable of warning.

If the moral tendency of this volume shall render it a suitable work to present to young men just commencing a career of service and honorable duty, surrounded by the population and temptations of the crowded mart, it will have fully accomplished its intention.

GREEN MOUNTAIN ANNALS.



CHAPRER 1.

Sweet is the breath of morn; her rising sweet

With charms of earliest birds.

There is too much of the solemnity of truth in what I am now to write, to allow me to give it the full dress of fiction--and yet the incidents of the narrative are too recent to allow a disclosure of real names. Many an eye, however, will moisten over the initials of names and places which I would hide only from a cold, unfeeling world. To some, the scenery I describe may rise up in freshness, like a dream of youth recalled in after years. The grass has not waved many summers over one grave to which I shall point, nor has the white marble, that guards a tomb which I shall disclose, yet corroded under the storm and sunshine of many seasons, since the principal events transpired to which I shall allude. I write, not to call up the sighs again from the bosom of affection; I write a tale of warning. I bring an offering to the shrine of morals. If I renew the sorrows of a friend it will be to prevent other and keener sorrows.

Three hours before daybreak in a balmy spring morning, there was a bright light shooting from the windows of Judge H---'s mansion in the town of W---, in one of the southeastern counties of the state of Vermont. A large beautiful family had arisen from unquiet rest. They had all assembled in the breakfast room. They had knelt in humble devotion before the altar, and were now seated at the table. A spectator, who knew nothing of the cause of this early rising, might have noticed the expression of deep emotion in each countenance of the family group. It was not a positive cast of sadness or of settled sorrow--yet it was solicitude in its tenderest developements.

Charles, my dear, why do you not take some breakfast? said an amiable and matronly looking woman at the head of the table. She addressed a tall, eagle-eyed youth of seventeen, whose cheeks were wet with tears at the sound of his mother's voice.

It is too early for much appetite, answered Charles, assuming as much nonchalance as he could under the disadvantage of tearful eyes. This domestic assemblage at the breakfast table might have formed a deep, rich study for a painter. No one had tasted of the food, and the odor of the coffee ascended invitingly, yet almost in vain. There was one plate loaded to excess with every delicacy: each one of the family vied in eagerness to help Charles, and pressed upon him the necessity of preparing for a weary journey over hill and dale, as though there had been a famine through all the wealthy region he was to pass.

Charles had never been a traveller. He had been embowered in the smiling villages of the Connecticut, and studied the world, as he had his books, in the seclusion of academic shades. He was improved in his mind, elegant in his manners--a model of beautiful and confiding manhood, with a soul of passion as yet unembittered by the regrets of disappointed desire or ambition. He was in the noble and generous spring tide of anticipation, the flower of a high-spirited, untarnished family, and destined, by those who now gazed upon him and tendered a thousand little endearing attentions, for the representative of their name and honor in a city whose merchants are princes. The mercantile profession had been selected by Charles as one leading most directly to honorable affluence; but his ardent mind had not bounded the future by the acquisition of wealth. His heart rioted in the exuberance of a power which he hoped one day to wield for the good of mankind.--There were high and holy examples before him of the generous devotion of wealth and talents to the cause of philanthropy and letters. He hoped for the highest distinctions which virtue awards to her votaries. Yet, perhaps, the severe student of human nature would have detected in the structure of his mind, an undue preponderance of enthusiasm. But it was a generous impulse--and the teaching of experience might curb the reins of his passions while they brightened and matured his judgment,

My son, said the fond mother, whose deep fountains of affection were stirred in her bosom by the approaching separation,--my son, you will not forget us when you are absorbed in the business and gaiety of a city life? She paused--and Charles could only give a low, but impassioned monosyllable in answer--no--no.

When shall we have the honor of seeing the city gentleman at our country residence again? said a volatile yet tender hearted sister.

I will come in two years, my good Marion, and bring you something that shall please you rarely.

Oh, I am not hard to please; if you will bring back yourself a little taller and a little more loquacious, I shall not complain.

Charles, said the venerable Judge, Marion has well said--bring back yourself. This is my request. I would rather see you bereft of life than to see you a profligate, or one of those miserable votaries of fashion that abound in cities. Never degrade your nobility of virtue and early morality by the slavery of vice. You will find thousands in the city to which you are destined, who are the noble ornaments of humanity; you will find thousands more whose fair appearances are but the polished outsides of the noisesome sepulchres; these are the seducers of the young and the unwary; they ever act on the principle of demons, which is to involve as many as possible in their own ruin. You cannot be ignorant of the solemn fact that nearly or quite one half of youthful adventurers from country to city return no more--they go from the purity of home and friendship to their destruction. Either dying prematurely, or, becoming so lost to honor and truth as to receive no confidence or regard from the virtuous, they are enrolled in the ranks of profligacy, and their friends know them no more, but as a living sorrow. I will give you a motto, Charles, by which you may direct your life. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear and honor God, and obey his commands, and you will find acceptance and respect and confidence in a land of strangers.

At the conclusion of this solemn parental charge, the whole family were in tears. A sense of the immense responsibility of character, as it is developed by daily conduct, rested on the heart of Charles--the parents saw the impression, and forbore to add words that might weaken it. The moment was one of heart-searching silence.

* * * * * * *

The twanging of a stage horn, mellowed by distance, came on the morning wind. A few moments of bustle and suppressed emotion succeeded;--and Charles had received the kisses of his mother and sisters, his father's blessing, and the fraternal grasp, and was now within the carriage that was to bear him from the sweet rural scenes of his innocent and uneventful childhood. There was a struggle of emotion in his bosom--a crowding sensation of fulness in his throat--a mass of indistinct images floating in his brain; but the morning air came with a reviving freshness in his face, and he leaned from the vehicle to contemplate the imperfect outlines of wood and vale and mountain hoary, from which he was fleetly passing.

It is a glorious sight to see the young day come into being among the Green mountains. The giant hills retain the night under the cover of their western cliffs, while their eastern sides are sprinkled with the ruddy hues of the morning. Light and shade in gloom and glory seem to be disposed in masses, that have indeed an affinity, yet are slow to mingle. Away up above the mountain summits a fleecy cloud floats on the deep blue bosom of the aerial sea; a flame of sunshine plays with its feathery surfaces, and gilds them with golden splendor. The vales and the streams that feed the storied Connecticut begin to develope themselves, and the gray of the early twilight strikes into the fields that lie teeming and rich between the guardian hills dressed in their uniform of immortal green.

It was sunrise on the plains when Charles reached the lovely village of B---, on the western bank of the Connecticut. The freshness of an early spring had spread a new foliage on the shrubbery that almost hid from the view of the passenger the beautiful white cottages or country seats that skirted the river in a long romantic street. An immense wall of mountain lay heavy and tremendous on the eastern bank of the river, over which the chariot of the sun was wearily rolling, and the carrols and joy of the feathered songsters filled the vale with such music as the God of nature was well pleased to create for a matin harmony.

At this village the dark and soul speaking eyes of Charles encountered those of a gentleman and lady rather beyond the meridian of life, accompanied by their daughter. Their appearance indicated wealth and high respectability. They were returning from a tour to the White Hills of New Hampshire to their residence in the city whither Charles was destined. The pleasure of all seemed somewhat heightened when it was ascertained that they were to be fellow passengers for the day--so true it is that congenial minds find a sudden sympathy attracting them towards each other at first sight, like the influence of a moral magnetism.

The morning was wearing away with pleasure--Charles was losing gradually the painful tension of his affectionate heart that had been strained with the emotions of a first parting from his beloved home. Conversation was animated, well bred, and pleasurable, blending amusement with instruction, the mellow wisdom of accomplished age with the enthusiasm of youthful vivacity. The carriage was rolling over the summit of a precipitous hill, when a half naked, horror-struck maniac, leaped from the thick hemlock and juniper brushwood, just before the horses, and uttered an unearthly shriek, which frightened the animals, who now plunged from the road, and dashed along on the frightful edge of a precipice, scorning the control fo the reins and heedless of the voice of the driver. A cry of horror burst from the gentleman and the two ladies in the carriage as it bounded from side to side over the rocks and seemed on the point of thundering down into the terrible ravine below. Charles only had the command of his thoughts; he burst the door--leaped out upon the upper side and recovered just to witness the young lady attempting to escape through the window on the other side. Her robe was entangled, and she seemed exposed like a helpless victim to be crushed between the rocks and the carriage, the upper wheels of which were raised high from the ground. Impelled by every feeling of humanity and native manhood, Charles rushed before the snorting steeds, and after sharp conflict with their hoofs and the momentum of their velocity, he succeeded in arresting their course, when the carriage righted, and the trembling father disengaged an only daughter from a position in which instant death had awaited her. It was with emotions of the most heartfelt gratitude that the rescued tourists descended from the carriage, and walked towards Charles, who stood, in the attitude of a young Hercules, on the very brink of a frightful chasm, the savior of their lives! The maniac was on the rocks far above them, with his bare arms stretched out, rigid and frightful, like a horrible apparition painted on the sky.

CHAPTER II.

First of your kind! society divine!

Still visit thus my nights, for you reserved,

And mount my soaring soul to thoughts like yours!

It is a proud moment when we have been permitted to save human life. No joy is so elevating and sweet as that which rushes to the heart the moment after some terrible danger had beset poor, frail humanity, and we know that our instrumentality has averted death. The pleasure of wealth, or of ambition, or influence, are not to be named in the same hour with the richer and purer joys of philanthropy. Like some cheering resting place on a wearisome journey, whose cool umbrage and fragrant flower refreshed and regaled us, are those favored hours or moments in which we have found opportunities of serving our fellow men without fee or reward--prompted only by the generous, flowing impulses of a benevolent nature. Such instances leave behind them a deep and blessed reminiscence; and when multiplied, as the noble minded, the gifted and the pure multiply them, they crowd thick and luscious into the vista of the past;--the good man has heaven behind him and before him.

It was a toilsome business to retrace the latest footsteps of our passengers. Their case resembled some desperate plunge in crime--the work of a moment--but laborious and dreadful to undo. The path regained, the acclivity and the precipice left miles behind, a sense of safety and confidence succeeded to anxiety; the past was laid up in the memory as one of those mementos which should teach gratitude to God every time it rose before the mind.

The gentleman, whose name was W---, begged to be favored with the name of the brave youth by whom under heaven the lives of himself and family had been rescued from imminent danger. Charles in a few words revealed his parentage. It was not unknown stock from whence he sprung, and although his cheek reddened with diffidence when he announced his name as the son of Judge H---, it was suffused still deeper with pleasure when he heard from the lips of Mr. W--- that he knew his father not only by reputation, but had been intimately acquainted in early life.

Your father, Charles, would applaud you to the very echo for saving the life of his old associate of forty years since.

He would only say, responded Charles, that I had done my duty and been most particularly fortunate. It makes me shudder to think it was possible that my well meant endeavors to avert the dangers of that moment might have rendered the catastrophe more certain and sudden. With all respect I would say, sir, that you should never mention my agency in this matter.

Well, Charles, we will drop the subject now. Companions in danger become soon acquainted. I think I know you as well as if you had lived next door to my house in B--- street all your days.

I am happy, father, that this young gentleman has not lived in B--- street all his days, said the interesting Miss W---, who had all along been silent, but had been looking gratitude and thankfulness from eyes that had shot deeper and darker glances, contrasted with the paleness that had come over her countenance in the late peril.

Why happy at that, my dear daughter? said Mr. W---.

The principal reason, I suppose, is a very selfish one, father; but I cannot help thinking our B--- street young gentlemen could have afforded us little aid in such rough times as we have just encountered.

Mr. W--- smiled and said, that he did know that Mr. Charles would consider her remarks a compliment.

Oh, I told you, father, that my remark was entirely a selfish one; I'm quite sure I did not mean to compliment where I owe so much gratitude.

That is well said, dear, and I will allow you to have as many preferences as you please in favor of the country, since you have been so much gratified with your week's rustication among the White Hills. I was born and educated in the country, and am most sincerely attached to its rural scenes and its innocence. I confess I feel a painful solicitude when I see a young man leaving the pure green fields for our crowded marts. I have no son, but if I had one, his early days at least should be spent in the country.

Thus, within a few hours, had a circle of acquaintance been formed that promised much pleasure for the day. Charles studied deeply the manners, sentiments and characters of those to whom, by one of the propitious chances of life, he had been introduced; they, in return, admired him, and felt an unwonted interest in his future welfare. The tide of conversation was varied, lively, uninterrupted. The storied fields of the revolution were at hand, and Charles could not resist the impression that he was approaching the seat of moral greatness. He saw before him the faultless specimens of refinement and dignified virtue of that city whose suburbs he would enter at the close of day; he saw around him the scenery that is woven into the texture of American history; he would soon pass the spot where the first blood flowed which was poured at the foot of the altar of independence. Thick coming fancies, as well as the high inspiration of the scenes around him, gave Charles the glow of beautiful and intellectual excitement which would have been irresistible in a form far less perfect than his; and he was every moment winning golden opinions from the circle around him. There is a charm in natural unsophisticated virtue, that defies the competition of art. There is a freshness in the mountain purity of freeborn manners that commends a youth to those who have seen most finished models of refinement that the world has produced.

The night-fall had settled down upon the verdant hills, and the carriage was sweeping over the delicious champaign that skirts one of the loveliest of our American cities. They had passed the seat where ancient learning embowered itself in the early days of our fathers. Centuries had thrown the romance of antiquity around the spires of the university, and lent their enchantment to the long sweeping branches of the venerable elms that hands since forgotten in the grave had planted for other generations to repose under, and for other time to admire. The proximity of the noble city, and an ocean which Charles had never seen, except in description, or rolling in the terribly expressive verse of Byron, almost suspended his breath. Thoughts unbidden and strange crowded into his mind. He was absorbed in contemplation, and, for a brief space, forgot the presence of those by whom he was surrounded. The dim outline of the city stretched before him like a vast, ancient mound built against the encroaching Atlantic. As he saw it he drew a deep sigh, and a voice seemed to speak low in his heart--there is your tomb. He started as from a sudden trance of sorrow--was rallied by Miss W--- on his silence, and gave but an indifferent excuse.

The night scenery of the approach to the city is one of the most imposing that meets the eye of the traveler in the western world. The long avenues and bridges across the bay with their streaming lights are seen like celestial fires in the deeps of the heavens reflected on the waters beneath--as if the zodiac had loaned its mimic belt to the earth, and strewn its stars like sentinels along the silver waves. A dark red tinge suddenly struck upon the arch of the heavens; the city grew bolder in its outline; the dome of its proudest edifice was seen high and towering on its mountain elevation, and spire and tower and roof on either hand swept away from this grand apex to the limits of vision. The glow in the heavens grew more intense, as if the ærial element was brightening in the fires of a strong furnace. The practised eyes of Mr. W--- detected these signs of a terrible conflagration, and hastily made a remark to that effect, when the hurried peals of the bells convulsed the stillness of the evening with their iron-tongued vibrations.

The rapid revolutions of the carriage wheels soon brought our passengers onto the city, which was now in the hot rush of thousands to stay or view the progress of the fire. The firemen, like the fierce assailants of a city although in fact its saviors, rushed furiously in long files under the glare of torches through the crowded streets. Trumpet answered trumpet, and hoarse outcries mingled in a sort of deep toned, horrid thunder, while higher in the atmosphere the clear bells uttered their far-heard and earnest cries of supplication and warning. The carriage paused for a few moments in a street that commanded a view of the scene of the conflagration. A lofty dwelling, apparently the abode of wealth and splendor, blazed like a pyramid of flame, in the very majesty of red ruin.--The lower dwellings on either hand vomited forth masses of black smoke, through which, at short intervals, swift flashes of fire vibrated like the rush of the lightning, or the gleam of swords in the sunbeams. It was a wonderful yet appalling sight to Charles to see the daring intrepidity of man contend with 			 the element which its maker has reserved to breathe over the earth, the air, and the ocean, in the midnight of time, when he shall kindle the last conflagration. The dauntless guardians of the city were seen ranged on the summit of heaving walls that were trembling like a leaf with the force and suppressed energy of internal volcanoes. Every inch gained by the flames was contested; and high over the roaring and ruddy piles, like rain-bows on the brow of ruinous storm, the arching jets of another element were thrown from the enginery. It was a most impressive scene. Man asserted the omnipotence of art, and braved the fiercest of the servants of God in the full terribleness of its power.

The tumult had died away, and Charles was making ineffectual attempts to compose his mind to slumber after the fatigues and excitements of one of the most animated days of his life. He could not close his eyes. They were kept open by an intensity of feeling which had never before taken possession of his bosom. At length, however, an insensibility to surrounding objects came over him, and a mental picture of solemn and prophetic import disclosed itself with a severe intensity to his soul. He seemed to see at a great distance on a high mountain, his father, mother, brothers and sisters. His father held a scroll in his hand, which waved in the wind and fluttered upwards towards some snow-white, lustred clouds. He saw in flaming letters on the scroll--The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. He looked again, and the bright clouds grew dark, and a shadow of melancholy settled on the mountain. The dress of his father's family appeared to be black, and wind and confusion seemed to fill the region around them. A white scroll was hurrying along in the breath and turmoil of the tempest on which, in black letters, he read these words--Her steps take hold on hell.

The scene changed again. He was in the midst of a city over which rolled a sea of flame. The earth on which it stood burned like lava, and the strong light seemed to search deep into the very heavens.--Suddenly in the midst of his terror he saw a form of angelic loveliness above him. He thought that he knew the features; he looked once more, and it was the face of Miss W--- with most earnest and tender expression of countenance gazing upon him with sorrow and pity and love so strangely blended that the emotion utter of ruin came over his soul like a cloud. He awaked, with a heavy pang at his heart--yet rejoicing that it was but a dream that had rendered his first night's rest in the city a season of unearthly and mysterious sensations.

CHAPTER III.

Genius, like a fallen child of light,

Has filled the place with magic, and compelled

Most beautiful creations into forms

And images of license, and they come

And tempt you with bewildering grace to kneel

And drink of the wild waters.

As Charles rose from his unquiet rest he found himself in the giddy whirl of a city. Business and pleasure, and virtue and vice, alike pursued with an absorbing energy, agitate the community of the metropolis.--More restless and fluctuating than the waves of the ocean that dash against the commerce burdened wharves are the crowds of busy men who struggle on the arena of pavements and stocks--of dividends unequally divided, and more sharers than shares. Nature can do but little in the artificial modes of a city life. Although the winds of heaven may fill the sail of the merchant vessel that comes from foreign lands with the wealth of other climes--yet the whole progress and completion of the adventure seems widely different from the calm process of wealth making in the country. The farmer and his family spend the cheerful evening in the midst of domestic bliss and quietude,--and yet every moment of time is witness of the silent movement of accumulation. The grass in the field and the wide inclosures of corn and fruitage are springing up and ripening whether man wake or sleep. By night or by day, in storm and sunshine, through each varying season of the year, the herds and the flocks increase in number and value--and yet man may repose an almost unimpassioned spectator. But in the city the night is turned into day and the day into night in the strenuous and heated strife for livelihood. The wheels of business roar with the fierce impulses of human agency. Riches are brought from the world's ends at the bidding of the sleepless, pale-faced mortal who is scarcely permitted to breathe the mountain air, or gaze upon the unobscured and holy skies that spread themselves in the lovely transcendancy of their beauty only over the crested mountain or the vale of rural innocence. But nature soon wears out in this intensity of labor, and the cemeteries are gorged with the loved ones and the hopes of far distant and confiding friendship.

The presentation of his letters of introduction and his adoption into a mercantile house of the highest standing, occupied the first morning that Charles ever spent in a scene of such bustling confusion. It was unfortunate, however, that when Charles became an inmate of the counting house, he had not at the same moment become an inmate of the domicil of one his principals. But it was not so. A respectable, or rather fashionable boarding house was recommended to him, as to a young gentleman whose connections and means gave him a choice of the mode of his life. Thus his evenings, with all their moral power, came into his own hands, to be used or abused as a better or a perverse disposition should preside over their destiny.

It was not possible that Charles should see any examples before him in the daily routine of business but those of probity and honor.

Intelligence, respectability, moral worth, and expansive benevolence, were the attributes of the gentlemen with whom a watchful parent had entrusted his son.

The advantages of a prepossessing figure and address are powerful pleaders for a young gentleman in the city society, especially when these are connected with family, respectability, and prospective wealth. Charles did not want for introductions to all that was fascinating and enchanting in the metropolis. The charming, yet but half educated, fashionable ladies of the immediate circle in which he moved--ladies with more manners than principles--were proud to secure the evening attentions of the young debutante from the country, who was indeed as blooming in his appearance and as pleasurable in his open and ingenuous deportment as one of his own mountain roses on its native stem. It cannot be denied that Charles as yet saw the city--its society--its customs--and its amusements with the eyes of a worshipper, who had contemplated the divinity of his adoration only at a distance. He had gazed on the far seen beauty of the accomplished and crowded mart--but as yet he had to learn that the cheek might be bright, the eyes dark and lustrous, the manners bland and alluring, while a moral disease was wasting,--yea, had consumed--the heart and blighted the affections.

Said Charles one evening, while sitting in the dress circle of one of the boxes of the theatre, to an engaging belle who had managed to secure his attentions for the evening--why is it that many excellent persons in the country are so prejudiced against theatrical representations?

Oh, said the arch and self satisfied lady, it is because a remnant of barbarism yet lingers among your Green mountains. Pray tell me how it was possible you could be educated in such a semi-savage community, and yet appear among us with all the graces of a Parisian. Will you tell me your secret?

I have no secret to disclose, said Charles, half offended at the reproach cast upon the beloved land of his nativity--yet perhaps a little soothed at the personal exception made in his favor--I have no secret to disclose: I think that the advantages and attainments of our genteel country society are rather undervalued here. I know and feel your superior privileges; yet I confess I am not so fully persuaded of the solid benefit of the spectacle before me as to feel willing that the eye of my honored father should see me here.

Forgive me, sir, said the smiling belle in a soothing and winning tone; I think you must have come from some upland Arcadia. But I'll watch over you to night as though you had a guardian angel near you, and will restore you safe to your home. You must know the motto--evil to him that evil thinks. The theatre has honey for the pure if it has poison for the impure. To be sure the farce now performing is of little consequence; it is only to kill time until the fashionables have arrived. But you will certainly be enchanted with Metamora. Pray did you ever see any Indians among your mountains?

I thank you for your offer of protection against the evil genius of the place, said Charles, with a feeling something like obligation--for his mind was measurably relieved by the delicately expressed sophisms of his fair mentor. The delicious strains of music soon gained upon his ear--his heart was beating high with the excitement of the scene--the violations of what he at first considered female propriety in the persons of the actresses obtruded for amusement upon the public eye grew less odious and repulsive--and his whole soul soon became identified with the enchantments of the place. A curtain fell between the acts where genius had wasted its pictorial power in gorgeous profusion. There lay before him an ancient Grecian city, with its pure and faultless architecture thrown up in beautiful piles into the soft skies, mellowed by the last rays of the setting sun. The rich, deep green of the groves were contrasted with the chisselled purity of the marble pillars and porticos; nor were there wanting the rough waves of the Aegean Sea kissing the pedestals of the eternal towers, bearing the gay triremes of antiquity on its heaving bosom. The splendid representation in one moment kindled every latent spark of classic enthusiasm in the bosom of Charles--and he fondly said that a glance of the eye had taught him more of Grecian power and beauty than he had ever gained from the living verse of Homer, or the more luscious representations of the Hellenic poets when Athens was the throne of mind and the seat of intellectual splendor.

Warmed with the stirring imagery around him, Charles was well prepared to connect the American classics with the noble Grecian, as the faultless form of Metamora stood before him in the fearless majesty of a forest king and uttered his wrongs in the thunders of nature's eloquence; and there too was the soul touching Namaoke, bound heart and soul into the welfare of her proud mountain chief. Powerful pleaders for your blasted race! murmured Charles, quite overcome by the illusions of the scene, go on and take your high revenge of their oppressors. Still command the tears of pity to flow for ancient wrongs that stained these pilgrim hills; and still hold up to a degenerate age the tribunal which sternly arraigns the deeds of cruelty and power.

After the battle and agony and death of the tragedy were over, the afterpiece had no power to attract the attention of Charles, whose bosom was swelling with the storm of passions that had been excited by the magic of genius--genius alone, for the hollow semblance of virtue is only seen on the buskined stage. He was looking in a melancholy, listless mood towards a higher tier of boxes where he saw an opera glass in the hand of a female, directed towards him. When it was removed, a cast of features met his eye that awoke strange and mingled reminiscences in his bosom. Why it was he could not tell--but his eyes were were chained with a painful, riveted gaze upon a countenance that sent thrills of sorrow to his heart. He was checked by the remark of his observing, self-constituted guardian for the evening, who lifted her finger in a threatening manner, and said--Mr. Charles H---, I shall not allow you to gaze upward. Remember--honey to the pure, but poison to the impure. There may be regions as much too high for your unstained morals as there are others too low.

Oh, I thank you, said Charles; I believe I was dreaming. Pray excuse my inattention.

Yes, sir, I will excuse your inattention, but I cannot just now excuse your attention. You must remember my pledge to return you safe home. Evil only to him that evil thinks.

Charles was half abashed at the tormenting insinuations of his bright-eyed mentor, who knew far too much of human nature and the devious wanderings of thought. He entreated her mercy, which she at length tendered on condition that he would think only of present company, and gratify her pride by such undivided attentions to her as should at least attract the notice of some malicious belles in an opposite box. This last motive, with natural or acquired tact of the sex, was, of course, unspoken. While this conversation was continued Charles was startled by a rustling noise and saw the huge folds of a curtain rolling down upon the stage--it was black! It was a portentous sign--one of the proprieties of circumstance that still lingers around the drama. The same dark, pall-like curtain that overshadows the last act, comes also over the latter end of the player and the devotee of the spectacle. Though the commencement and the progress may be light and joysome, the finale is curtained with gloom. Charles felt this reproof deep in his soul, and shuddered as he walked out--yet, although this was the first evening he had ever spent beneath the roof of a theatre, it was not the last. Each time, however, the drop scene was black.

One beautiful June morning, Charles received at his counting room a rose-colored billet, containing the compliments of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss W---, with an invitation to an evening soiree at their elegant mansion in B--- street. He went--and surely if virtue and happiness were enthroned on earth they were in the lovely and polished family.--Charles was received with the most unfeigned expressions of pleasure, while a thousand kind and tender inquiries for his welfare and happiness succeeded.--He was introduced to a select company, with commendations and an emphasis which brought his mountain color more than once to his cheeks. The mild lustre of the beautiful astral and moonlight lamps that fell on the snowy marble of the sideboards and the entablatures lent an eloquent enchantment to the apartment which was yet more radiant with smiles and cultivated intellect. Here might the epicures of mind who hungered for the ideal good in the barren wastes of idolatry have found the summum bonum of human happiness. The interchange of holy affections in the polished modes of higher life presents a scene that angels might contemplate with delight. The heart is overflowed with kindly emotions. The chaste form of virtue is lighted up with its own internal blessedness--and moves, and breathes only to fan the kindred flame in the bosoms of kindred spirits.

It was in this choice circle of intellectual worth that Charles found himself embosomed in the highest happiness his nature could know.--Miss W--- was a most interesting being in his eyes--an intellectual sylph--an incarnation of sensibility and hallowed affections. He could almost have wished that his little adventure in which he was the happy instrument of averting harm from this peerless family had involved more danger or even suffering to himself. Yet he was contented to be the grateful recipient and witness of so much refined pleasure.

He went away at a late hour, with visions of bliss floating through his mind. He was startled at the corner of a street by a female figure gazing with the same intense and sorrowful look upon his face as at the theatre. He was speechless, and stood as if charmed to the spot by an eye that went to his soul like a dagger.

CHAPTER IV.

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd

Long since: with many an arrow deep infixed

My panting side was charged.

The full view which Charles obtained of the sorrowfully impressive countenance before him, at this late evening hour, recalled to his mind an almost forgotten circumstance. He had been intimately conversant with a young lady three years before at W--- academy. She was conspicuous among a hundred blooming maids for sprightliness and wit; she was indeed the life of every circle. Charles had heard of her following a lover to the metropolis; and then a few dark hints or innuendoes succeeded, importing that she had been ruined, and was leading a life of infamy. She had suffered such a change of countenance and figure that Charles was slow in coming to these recollections, for neither of them had spoken while their gaze of sorrow and mutual emotions had been longer than the common manners of society would have justified. With a heavy heart, sighing over too probable fate of the lost--utterly ruined--Helen S---, Charles slowly wandered home and resigned himself to an overpowering sensibility in the loneliness of his chamber. Let this, though he, be a solemn lesson of virtue to me. I have seen the fearful contrast. On the one hand, the sweet and angelic Miss W---, pure and fascinating, because intellectual and virtuous; on the other hand, Helen S---, a wandering star, shot from the lovely orbit of female propriety, a lone night wanderer in the streets, with an anguish on her brow that makes my heart bleed to see. What can she want with me? Perhaps she would implore me to save her from a life which she abhors. No doubt she has recognized me, and my features are associated in her mind with the lonely elms and moon-lighted walks of W---. Is not this fitting season, while her memory must recal a thousand scenes of innocent delight, to address her on the subject of a return to her excellent friends in Windsor county? Am I not the one designated by Providence to lead this lost one gently back to her former peace of mind and restore to her a forfeited reputation?

The reflections came unbidden over the softened heart of Charles before he retired to rest. He knew little of that serpent wickedness which sometimes, yes, oftentimes, lurks in the bosoms of seeming peace and tranquility. The project, half formed, which floated in his imagination might have been, in its results, like the ill-requited kindness which once warmed a viper to life, and was rewarded with poison.

* * * * * * *

One year had passed away, and Charles, like the exiled Joseph in Egypt, had found great favor among strangers. Judge H--- was a visitor to the metropolis, and if ever his heart dilated with proud paternal triumph, it was when he saw his excellent son already honored by immense confidence, and effecting transactions that carried his youthful name beyond the seas. There was in his open, dignified countenance the princely air of virtuous manhood, yet a sweet condescension was in all his manners, as if to secure the affections of those whom he addressed, and bind them at will. But no pen can do justice to a father's feelings as they were called forth on a visit to the accomplished family of Mr. W---, the former associate of Judge H---. It was near sunset, as Charles, arm and arm with a father to whose proud heart he seemed bound by more than nature's ties, walked down B--- street to the elegant mansion of Mr. W---. The sweet-scented gales of spring came across the bay, bearing the aroma of the green fields beyond. The notes of the woodland birds were faintly heard beyond the waters; and the joyous echoes of country life blended with the sounds of the sea, and the mellowed thunder of the busy streets. The public walks of the city, shadowed by the weeping branches of the elms, and the area, sacred to health, and the play of the pure winds, lay on their left; their minds were soothed to friendship's holiest issues by the sympathetic influence of an unrivalled scenery, to which nature, art, and lofty deeds of patriotism had imparted a glory like that which lingers around the holiest spots on the earth's surface.

They entered the lofty porch between corinthian pillars of parian marble; they were seated in a room which seemed animate with the breathing and passion-speaking forms of the chissel and the pencil; but more than Grecian and Italian refinement was developed in the manners of the inmates of a palace that ranks among the chastest structures of a city, unrivalled in its architectural beauty on this western continent. Mr. W--- with the most hearty good will and cordiality embraced his old friend Judge H---; and, while they rapidly proceeded to fill up the chasm of years which had separated them, the Judge could not but remark, with a proud satisfaction, the respectful and even affectionate intimacy that appeared to exist between his beloved son and one of the first families in the city. The relation of the stage adventure could scarcely account for such a confiding, open-hearted display of friendship towards Charles by the accomplished Mrs. W---, and her no less intellectual and accomplished daughter.

Could not a father's heart be pardoned for treasuring up in its deepest recesses these gratifying tokens of the future happiness of a son who had already, as he believed, conferred honor on his family name? Perhaps, too, a father in such circumstances might be pardoned for the rising anticipation of a family union with one of the choicest names of the city, or the commonwealth; but, as yet, no tongue had clothed such a thought in words. With reluctance, yet with joy, the excellent Judge took leave of his son, and of a circle of generous spirits, who seemed to have conspired to enchant the proud father's heart by attentions and favors to the son.

Well, my dear father, said Marion, who had met her father at the gate under the lilac shrubbery, now do tell me how Charles does, before you tell any one else; pray do; that's a sweet father.

He is well, my daughter, and an honor to us all.

But has he altered, and become very different from what he was when left us last spring? Do tell me that--for if he has he is not my Charles any more.

Oh, he has altered, I suppose; but I hope every alteration has been an improvement. Come, Marion, you should not keep me from your mother so; it is selfish in you.

The Judge embraced his family and related with joyful particularity every circumstance connected with his charming visit and his truly hopeful son. The glow of happiness sat on every cheek. The evening prayer was fragrant with thanksgiving.--Sleep came like a white-winged cherub sitting lightsome on each eyelid, and the dreams that visited the white mansion among the Green Mountains were the bright revealings of the future, clad in the reflected glory of the present. What a world would this be were there no sin!

Summer came--and the fortunate Charles had the pleasure of a month's relaxation from business, which he spent in a fashionable flight along the line of some of the Atlantic cities and through the Niagara, in company with the family of Mr. W---. Charles and Miss W--- seemed to be formed in nature's happy hour for each other. They both delighted in nature more than in art--drank in beauty and freedom of thought from the prospect of silver lakes, tumbling cascades, and the green-belted forests; while they trembled at the roar of the world's loudest cataract, and adored in their inmost souls the omnipotence that created this wonder.

It will not excite surprise in the mind of the reader of these annals, when it is said that Charles generally associated with spirits of such moral purity as never to have learned the black deeps of treachery and moral infamy which lie hidden from casual observation in our cities. Reared in the calm and pure scenes of country life, what could he know of the arts and stratagems of those whose steps take hold on hell? Happy in his inexperience, every bright face he met was regarded by him as an index of happiness; he knew not that the abominable and horrid dens of moral defilement were there, concealed by a fair outside of respectable opulence; he knew not that destruction spread its nets in the very streets he walked, and that hundreds of innocent victims were annually offered upon the base altar of guilty passion. Vicinity to the reputed scene of any criminality, and seeing nothing or little of its effects, and hearing no alarm expressed by those who might be presumed to know of the existence of any very threatening evil,--all have a wonderful tendency to allay apprehension, and dull the admonitory hints of parents and friends who may live far distant and beyond the means of acquiring any accurate knowledge of the subject of their fears.

The theatrical season commenced in autumn, and Charles followed the multitude very frequently to this modern school of morals and refinement. He was sincerely attached to the excitements of the drama, and found no counteraction to his inclinations in the moral atmosphere of his associations at his lodgings. The worst part of the business to him was the frequency with which he encountered a countenance to which we have alluded--recalling the past in romantic vividness of coloring, and awakening a strong curiosity in his mind to learn her actual situation, and a tender desire to be the agent of extricating her from ruin. Young gentlemen of susceptible passions and who know little of the world are the last to be selected as the wards of the fallen female. The destruction goes so deep and the affections of nature change so terribly to guile and revenge, that the aged, the mature, and the prudent are the only ones who should minister in the cure of this dreadful pestilence. Happy may they be, if they shall save one in ten from everlasting burnings!

The amusements which Charles had indulged in, although they were continually working a moral deterioration in his character, had not as yet changed his demeanor so as to excite the alarm of the higher circle of his friends. Miss W--- indeed sometimes half feared that he was not the pure, bright being as when she first saw him. She had, alas, some reason for her fears--yet the tenderness of her deep affection towards him, which had ere this ripened into full strength, would not permit her to regard the idol of her heart as less than perfection itself.

CHAPTER V.

But the hour of darkness girds him now

With a pall of deepest night

Anguish sits throned on his moody brow,

And the course of thy withering blight,

Despair, thou dreariest, deathliest foe!

His senses hath steeped in a torpid woe.

Near the close of a stormy afternoon, during which Charles had been alone at the counting-house, he took about fifteen hundred dollars of money belonging to his principals, which he put in his pocket for safe keeping, and retired to his lodgings. The dreariness of the weather, heavy, gloomy, and dripping, as the reign of the winter was giving way to the second spring that Charles had been an inhabitant of the city, had caused a corresponding dulness and depression in his spirits. He was seated alone after tea, pensively thinking of his home. The forms of his beloved and honored father, and mother, and brethren, and sisters, rose on his recollection like the beautiful shapes of innocence which young fancy creates before the clouds of sorrowful reality and moral obliquity have darkened the morning of life. He felt sad at thinking there had been days in which his soul had been more at peace than at that moment. He was proceeding to reason on the comparative innocence of country habits and amusements, contrasted with those of a city life, when, suddenly, the temptation of the drama obtruded before him, as an expedient for spending a night that hung heavy on his hands.

While putting on his cloak, the thought crossed his mind that, as yet, he had never seen the accomplished Miss W---, at the theatre, and that he had never even mentioned to her his frequent visits to the resort, once frequented by venerable and the wise, but now on the wane in public estimation, as an unhealthy hot-bed of passion, where the shoots of genius are sickly, and of mushroom growth. A few half-stifled admonitions of conscience occupied his thoughts until the broad, gairish blaze of the theatre lights smote reproachfully upon his eyes. There were actors ranting without one thrill of nature or eloquence to "a beggarly account of empty boxes." No one there considered the storms of mimic passion which were to roll that night over the stage, as worthy of any attention. The young men who were present perambulated the lobbies, and appeared transiently on the seats, while frequently flitted before them those garnished sepulchres, those spectres of moral ruin, fair, perhaps to the sight, but hollow and dreadful within, as the grave that yawns beneath a hedge of roses. Charles met at the bottom of the stairs, the once fascinating and eminently lovely Helen S---. With a perception of his character, which was as intuitive as unerring, a sorrow came over her features like a shadow, and the tones of her voice were thrilling, as she answered his inquiry. Well Ellen, is that you?

Yes, Mr. H---, I am Ellen. I have often seen you, and have some most important communications to make. I thought that I never should have a chance to speak to you.

It makes me happy to see a kind face once more from Vermont.

Oh, said Charles, touched with pity for what he suspected might be her sorrows, I have quite as often wished to speak to you, but hardly knew how or where to find you. Have you been well since our moonlight walks at W---? Pray do not look quite so melancholy, you make me feel unhappy.

The conversation continued some time. The tempter of old, delineated by the pencil of inspiration, might not have caught Charles in her snare. I looked through my casement and discerned among the youths a young man void of understanding, passing through the street near her corner and he went the way to her house, in the twilight, and in the evening, in the black and dark night,--are words more applicable to the unsuspecting character and situation of Charles, than the remainder of Solomon's graphic description is to the arts of the ruined Helen; although there is quite a similarity in her address to the following language:--Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee. The unfortunate and highly gifted Charles H---, on whose character and virtue an immense and incalculable amount of human happiness depended, was now face to face with a deeper cunning for ruin than even the wisest among men had portrayed. With a female of proud spirit and high attainments, whose every fortune had been wrecked by the baseness of man, and whose every feminine virtue, even her gentleness, had turned into the poison of hate and the tenfold concentration of vindictive passions--who could "smile--and smile--and murder while she smiled," Charles walked arm in arm from the temple of histronic triumphs to a respectable looking dwelling, whither she led him, in P--- street. She accompanied him to a chamber, elegantly furnished--and he was seated on a sofa awaiting her important disclosures!

If any ask what brought a young gentleman of the reputation and the education of Charles H--- into circumstances of so much danger that every reader cannot but feel the critical dilemma of his fate, the only answer is, curiosity--that which has destroyed the human race in every age from Eden downwards. Curiosity, not unmingled with pity and generosity, had brought the flower of the Green Mountains beneath a roof from whence, although many enter, few are seen to return--for her house was the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

With well dissembled sorrow, or rather as that anomaly among monsters, which is said to shed tears over the victim it allures to its jaws, the syren of our tale of truth told her story of seduction. She painted the past again in the vivid colors of female genius, and laid the terrible and weighty charge of her undoing at the door of a merchant, who had decoyed her from her maiden purity. His name was well known to Charles. Her tears flowed in torrents as she brought up from the recesses of memory the image of parents, friends, and the blasted anticipations of her youth. Her eloquence was no copy; it was nature's self, impassioned and irresistible, that spoke to the softened, pitying heart of her only auditor. She ran her story through even to the time of telling it; and in the very tempest of her passion, watched with the satisfaction of a fiendlike hyenna the deep, furrowing impression that her words made on the unstained heart of Charles H---.

Oh, you are the only being on earth to whom I have told my tale of suffering and wrong, said she, almost choaked with tears. I now can die comparatively happy--for I have poured out my griefs like a flood into your pitying bosom. You are heaven-sent--an angel commissioned to receive the last offering which I can render to virtue's self, through her representative.

In a strain like this, but far more affecting, she poured out the history of her wrongs into his heart. Her eyes were imploringly fixed on his--she had seized his hands in the agony of her sorrow--he felt her tears mingling with his own on his cheeks--he was lost before even a thought of his own danger came into his mind.

* * * * * * *

Farewell now to the triumphant emotions of a virtuous heart bounding high with moral health. Farewell to peace of conscience when virtue's pure temple has been desecrated, and an unhallowed flame, as transient as it was terrible and scathing, has flashed upon its altar! The ruin of this sin goes to the lowest foundations of morality and affection. A change comes over the guilty man or woman that dims the lustre of the eye, fades the cheek, and makes the heart a coward before its God.

It is not wonderful, since the events of this evening have become the materials of a melancholy biography, that this refinement of seduction should have been practised on Charles. Through the excited tempest of his passions, aroused, as it would seem, almost at virtue's bidding, could the only avenue be found for a treacherous syren to infuse a poison into the centre of his soul which should change all the color of his fate.

The dark and the black night drew its curtain around the scene: the rain and the wind thundered on the house-tops and pavements, and the demons of the invisible world might have passed by in gambols of hellish triumph--but Charles was ruined!

The atmosphere of the room was heavy. Charles was sick at heart, and eagerly drank a glass of spiced wine that was offered him, hoping to regain that flow of spirits which had passed away forever. The wine was drugged, and Charles fell into a deep sleep-- a poor, ruined, helpless victim in a house of assignation. Oh, could the ghost of the slain, who had been robbed of all that makes youth lovely, life a blessing, and heaven an anticipation, in the house where a slumberer stretched his doomed limbs, have passed before him, it would not have been in the power of the potion to have held his senses in oblivion. Pale female forms would have glided from their premature graves, the wretched dweller in a hopeless eternity; his hair would have been erect and stiff at sight of the gory bosom of the suicide, and he would have shuddered at the horrible spectres of ruined young men, who brought their doating parents to a sorrowful grave which they filled to the brim with shame before they leaped in themselves, and drew after them all whom affection had bound to their doom.

The dim and yellow light of the morning struggled through the shutters of the windows, and disclosed to the horror-stricken Charles that he was alone in the room--had been robbed of the money belonging to the mercantile house with which he was connected--and of the greater part of his clothes.

CHAPTER VI.

Thou unrelenting Past!

Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,

And fetters, sure and fast,

Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

A dreadful discovery it is to a young man that he is ruined! All his choicest aspirations, his dearly cherished hopes, cut off in a black joyless moment--as if the bottomless gulf of annihilation had yawned before him, foreclosing the life that is to come, as well as the joys of that which now is. It is even worse to the imagination than oblivion or annihilation can be. No state is more full of horrors than that living certainty of shame, which spreads its atmosphere all around the lost. As certain as the sun shines in beauty upon the earth, as sure as reputation is a priceless gem, as sure as the red currents of life run from the heart to the extremities, so surely and sensibly and irrevocably is the ruin wrought. The mind and soul withers under the searing consciousness of the complete desolation--and yet a fierce, unappeaseable enemy to man whispers inly that the overthrow is more irretrievable than it really is. This fearful being roars now like a lion over his wretched prey. He calls from their dusky realms every phantom of pale despair, and suggests the language of utter blasphemy, babbling and mocking the horror-stricken delinquent with damnable counsels.

The state of agitation in which Charles found himself on awakening from the sleep of the night, covered his features with perspiration, and gave his countenance a cadaverous hue. He knocked at the door of his room, and was attended by a large, masculine looking woman, bearing in her face the index of vice, who demanded what he wanted. He stated in a raving, incoherent manner that he had been robbed of money and clothes--and wanted to see Helen S---. The female fiend told him that she knew of no such person as he named, and that there was not a living soul in the house except herself--that if he was not quiet she would alarm the police and have him arrested as a thief who might have broken into her house to plunder.

The half relenting features of the virago seemed to relax as she surveyed the beautiful proportions and symmetry of the form which were so conspicuous in the victim before her. She told him that he might as well stay in quiet through the day, and, perhaps, in the evening he might see the female again who conducted him thither. Thunder-struck--wrecked on the rocks of irretrievable despair--his character for moral honesty as well as chastity blasted for ever--he did not seem to have power to move from the spot; he even hailed it as a sort of shelter under which he might hide his head from virtuous and honorable. The day of terrible accusations of conscience and hopeless pangs of heart at length ended; and at night the various rooms of the house began to murmur with echo of voices. The governess of this den of infamy introduced some desperate looking young men into the apartment in which Charles had raved during a day which seemed to him like a terrible portion of eternity, carved out from the other side of the dividing line of human existence, and thrown into this--a bitter and scorching foretaste of final perdition. These desperadoes knew the history, and present condition of Charles with an astonishing precision. They told him that it was all over with him--that the evening papers had announced a large reward for his apprehension as an absconder with the funds of a mercantile house, and that every officer in the city was on the lookout for his detection. They counselled him to make a common cause with them, forge a check in the name of the house in whose employ he had been on the bank in which they were accustomed to deposit, and divide it with him.

The ears of Charles were deaf to these suggestions. He had a preternatural discernment imparted to him during the fierce mental agony of the day which stripped vice of every concealment and subterfuge. They saw at once that an internal conflict of such keenness and agony was going on in his mind that it was not prudent to urge him so soon to join their lawless clan. They departed, hoping that a few days more might bring him fully into their schemes.

Poor Charles was now a maniac. Reason was obscured, and judgement tottered on its throne. Refusing food, he walked backwards and forwards through the day, moaning to himself in a most melancholy manner. But he was now on the destroyer's ground. Failing to make him subservient to their purposes, the lawless invaders of the rights of mankind who lived in daily defiance of every human and divine law, determined in savage revenge to number the horrors of disease with his other miseries. They had managed to get him to add the madness of intoxication to the more fearful madness of intellect, and had forced into his company one of those dreadful forms of moral and physical death which paint and dress can scarcely disguise into the shale and outline of female beauty.

* * * * * * *

What violations of the creature in the form of his maker shall be disclosed in the day when every deed of earth shall be uncovered--when, rank and fouler than the corruption of the grave, the acts of prostitution shall start into view from the privacy of the curtained and darkened retreats of indescribable sin and receive their reward!

A wet and heavy morning was it when Charles was forcibly ejected from the house that had sheltered him for more than a week. He was thrown into the street without a hat or outer garment, and could not have pointed out the house from which he came. Staggering under the influence of his mental agony and the schorchings of a terrible fever which seemed to drink his blood and impart to it the sensation of liquid fire as it coursed along his swollen veins, Charles irresolutely directed his course towards one of the bridges, with the design uppermost in his mind of leaping into the bay and seeking death in the cool element. But as he approached the vicinity of the bridge a horrible sensation of sickness and giddiness came over him. The city danced a moment in his eyes, and he fell upon the sidewalk. A hospital was near at hand, and a benevolent citizen, early abroad, caused the apparently lifeless body of Charles to be taken up and carried to the magnificent pile which individual and state munificence has endowed with every comfort for the unfortunate. Here consciousness, bitter as death mingled with horrors of frenzy, revisited the lost and utterly ruined Charles H---.

Meanwhile, the greatest alarm had been felt in his behalf by excellent Messrs. ----, his principal and devoted friends. They found him not at his boarding house--they sought to obtain information of him at the house of the respected Mr. W---, in B--- street;--they at length traced him to the theatre, and with a commendable prudence, after they had discovered the loss of the money, enjoined secresy on all of whom they had made enquiry, and prosecuted the search as privately as possible, but with the most unwearied diligence. After the lapse of four days, and gaining no trace of him further than the theatre, they dispatched a messenger to Vermont to inform his father.

It was an April evening, and the family of Judge H--- were sitting around the parlor fire. Marion had that afternoon written a letter to her brother Charles, reminding him of his promise to come home in two years, and expressing her expectations of seeing him before May day morning. She sat with a smile on her calm face thinking how Charles would look while he read some lines in her letter which referred to a lady in the city of whom she had heard much from her father--she was suddenly interrupted by a stranger, who desired a private interview with the Judge. When the Judge returned to the family, it was with sorrow and concern imprinted on his features. He revealed what he had heard of his son with a voice trembling with emotion and choked with tears. Every one crowded around him to urge his instant departure for the city with groans and weeping. He wisely counselled his family to say nothing of the mysterious disappearance of his son until he should return; and, with a head bowed down with sorrow, he accompanied the messenger to the metropolis. After calling on the mercantile gentlemen with whom his son had been connected, Judge H--- went to the house of his old friend Mr. W---. He was shocked to see the weeds of mourning around the room, and as his name was announced, Miss W--- rushed into the room in deep black, her face blanched to the paleness of marble; she threw herself into the arms of the venerable Judge, and seemed to be almost suffocated with tears.

Oh, find your Charles--find my Charles--find him or I never shall see any more happiness on earth.--Where is he? where? You do know--you do--tell me quick--or I shall ----.

Miss W--- had read in the sorrowful air of the Judge the answer to her incoherent inquiries, and swooned as her last gleam of hope had died away at seeing the father without any intelligence of the son. It was a long and heart-rending interview. The most thorough plans had failed of success. No gleam of hope remained of finding him, any more than if he had been carried up from earth in a whirlwind.--The most reasonable conclusion was that he had come to his end by violence, and it was determined in one or two days to invoke the aid of the police and the public press on the occasion, which now had assumed a terrific and agitating character.

One afternoon the writer of these annals visited the hospital, and was pensively walking through the wards and taking note of death's doings, when his ear was arrested by the feeble ejaculation--Oh, it is hard to die thus! The voice came from a bed on which lay the delicate form of a youth, wasted to a skeleton. The few articles of dress bespoke a better fate; but disorder and the terrible fever of the brain which ever attends madness had made a complete--an irretrievable wreck of the manly youth who now lay before me. On inquiry I found that there was some mystery hanging around this case. The young man had given his name as Champion, but had steadily refused in his lucid intervals, if any he had, to give the name of a single friend. The ravings, self accusations, and exclamations of the youth had been of an appalling character, but had afforded no key to unlock his history. The afternoon I saw him, it was said that nature seemed to be exhausted, and the medical attendant expected his speedy dissolution, as reason appeared to make a last rally before the soul quitted its tenement.

This intelligence influenced me to make him every offer of friendship. In a kind and sympathizing manner I approached him, took his hand, and said--My dear sir, you appear ill. His eyes swam with tears in a moment, and emotion choaked his answer; I took advantage of this softening of his soul, and poured the balm of consolation into his wounded bosom. I pointed him to Jesus, as a friend who stood especially near the bed of death to help the poor frail beings of an hour over the terrible bounds that divided time from eternity. He died to save the lost, said I, and now he liveth evermore.

A sweet comfort seemed to diffuse itself through his mind as I spoke, and when I rose to depart and promised to visit him again, he requested that it might be in the evening, as that might be his last on earth. I hastened thither early, and found the youth in a quiet frame of mind. The blast of strong agony which rent his soul had passed over, and nothing remained to him but the inclined plane which leads directly to an early grave. He could not speak, but his whispers were distinct and penetrated to my heart like naked vibrations of thought, so few his words and yet so full of meaning.

* * * * * * *

I hide for a little time the revelations of that evening, save what I have already embodied in these annals. He told me, in the pale twilight of the eternity he was entering, the history of the last few days of his life, the names of his parents, and friends, and surrendered up his soul to the disposal of the Creator with an appearance of christian resignation which was truly soothing to my heart. At his request I promised to sit by his bed during the night. He had given me messages to his dear parents, brothers and sisters, and a most affecting one to Miss W---. After this he lay exhausted and scarcely seemed to breathe, until after twelve o'clock, when spasmodic pains attacked him, attended with the optical delusions of delirium. He imagined that a horrible monster with the features of Helen S--- was ever before him, gazing at him with an insufferable malignity. He seemed to fly to distant regions to avoid the glare of the sorceress. He implored with shrieks that the monster might follow him no more--the face was still before his face, like a counterpart; it was the face of death!

With soothing words and strong mental prayer I strove to calm his soul, and hush the tumult of his evidently departing spirit. At about half past three in the morning, the lately accomplished Charles H--- was no more. He was a slumbering form of clay. The terror that haunted him in his last hours had no power over him then. He slept calmly, like those who expect not to be waked until the trumpet of the resurrection shall call them forth.

Without saying a word to the inmates of the hospital, I hastened to my lodgings, and strove to gain a few hours of troubled rest; after which I hurried to the house of Mr. W---, in B--- street. What was my surprise at finding there the father of the youth whose dying messages I had in charge! I told him the worst of the case, for it was a subject too awful to permit of deceit which would, at best, have been soon detected without affording the shadow of comfort. When we rose to go to the hospital, the pale and marble form of Miss W--- was with us. No intreaties could prevail on her to stay behind. As we entered the long covered passage leading to the hospital we met a coarsely constructed coffin borne on the shoulders of two men, which I was about to pass; but a father's intuitive affection told him that the corpse of his son was about to be buried in such unseemly haste, as though no friend on earth was interested in the matter.

Stop, monsters, shrieked the father, you shall not carry off my precious son--my Charles.

He fell, overcome by his emotions, on the coffin. A pale being stood by him, to whose cheek not a tear whould come--from whose bosom not a sigh would heave--her sorrow was unutterable.

CHAPTER VII.

------------Thou shalt lie down

With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,

The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

All in one mighty sepulchre.

It was one of those solemn hours of life that the pen and tongue have never described which succeeded the first shock of parental anguish and a lover's agony. The cold arrest of death that binds up in its eternal frost the affection of one lover loosens the reserve of the other; and now the full ardor of virgin love burned in its unconcealed intensity in the bosom of Miss W---. Yet it was a love for the dead;--the chill, inanimate form of Charles H--- could not feel the answering throb of virtuous passion. His earthly sorrows had ended. His aspirations and high designs of honor and usefulness were over. The deep fountains of thought were dried up in his bosom. His eyes no longer spoke their unutterable language in every intellectual glace. Death's dull hour of rest had come--and nothing could disturb the wearied and care-worn sleeper save the shout of an archangel.

Now came into action the power and efficacy of religion. Heaven-descended and precious, its consolations alone could assuage the wounded hearts of the living--while the faint hope excited by the last expressions of the beloved dead was of more value than the richest bequests of wealth or the posthumous echoes of renown.

But, with all his resignation to the will of heaven, Judge H--- could not look on the wasted face of his son, whose form was as dear to him in death and disgrace, as it had been in life and in honor, without feeling a deep anger at the horrid influences that had caused such a ruin. He could not but regard his son as more than murdered by demons that had rioted in their infernal triumphs over purity of heart and blamelessness of manners. It is possible, thought he, that a christian land contains within its boundaries such a maelstrom of moral death as a theatre, linked as it ever is to those dwellings in the background, whose chambers are those of death!

Addressing the lovely and sorrowing being who shared all his mourning--I will carry the remains of my dear departed Charles to the pure mountains which gave him birh. His mortal enemy shall never have the pleasure of holding his dust as a spoil. Virtue, and affection, and love, shall yet watch over that form in its last repose which is dearer to me in ruin than ever. I too will go with you, responded Miss W--- with unwonted energy of manner. No human power shall prevent my following to the grave, which now appears like a sweet resting place to me, all that I loved on earth!

I could no longer witness those struggles of affection. My heart had been swollen with an unwonted succession of gloomy emotions, and I left these truly excellent people to bear away their dead from the strand on which moral shipwreck had been made. What follows in this narrative I learned some few months after from Miss W--- on her return, and from correspondence with the Judge.

I had been sitting that afternoon in a sort of mournful abstraction of mind, when I carelessly took up an evening paper, and saw a notice that the body of an unknown female had been found in the morning floating in the bay near ---- bridge, supposed to have been a girl of ill fame. I was most singularly impressed with the idea that it might be a part of that terrible tragedy I had so recently witnessed. I immediately went to the coroner, and gained access to the body, which had not been interred, and found it to be that of a female apparently of beauty and youth--yet a deep, fiendlike anguished gloomed on the brow, and made me shudder. The notice in the paper had attracted some visitors--yet none seemed to recognize the features, unless now and then some gay young man, who turned pale and hurried away. One of these I followed, and gained from him satisfactory evidence that the countenance of the female was well known to those who were in the habit of attending the theatre, and in all human probability it was Helen S---. The female had been noticed passing the toll gate of the bridge about the hour that Charles was engaged in a horrible struggle with the real or unreal form of Helen; a splash in the water, as stated in the paper, had been shortly after heard--and the probablity is great that the destroyer was struggling with a watery death at the same hour her victim died; and that by some mysterious spiritual visitation she had been permitted, for the last time, to fix her withering look on Charles as he was tossing in the arms of death.

Evening had set in upon the green hills of Vermont, and the family of Judge H---, who had been apprized by letter of the melacholy fate of their beloved Charles, were sitting sorrowfully around the hearth, when they were startled by the arrival of a carriage. The father, venerable in virtue more than in years, now descended and handed a lovely mourner to the house, and the body of Charles in a rich sarcophagus was borne in after her. The tears of that evening can never be numberd on earth. The mother and sisters were almost suffocated with floods of anguish; they groaned and wept aloud, and a sound of uncontrollable lamentation pervaded the dwelling. As soon as the first excesses of sorrow had subsided, the Judge thus addressed his family:--Bow submissively to the will of our heavenly Father who has mercy even in this dispensation; and let us now mourn not as those who mourn without hope. He then related every incident connected with the last days and death of Charles, solemnly adding--now remember that the honor of the dead is in your keeping. So much secresy and obscurity has rested over his latter end that no dishonorable report, in mercy to us and to his name, has been suffered to go out. He is believed to have died of a sudden and violent attack of the brain fever. Sustain yourselves, my wife and children, to fulfil the last duties we owe to his remains, and the duty of affection which we owe to the dear Miss W--- who has come to share our sorrows. Let us look up penitently to God, who has permitted us thus to be afflicted that we may be weaned from time and allured to a preparation for eternity.

The tears of this afflicted family were now dried up at the altar of devotion. The morning came and with it the solemn preparations for the funeral services. The news of the death of Charles and of the arrival of the body and of the expected interment flew over a large region of country, and thousands of that noble hearted and sympathizing people came together to pay the last sad rites which humanity claims. The ministers of three sects of christians, arm in arm, appeared to administer heavenly consolations. The sincerity and amount of the sympathy evinced on the occasion was almost overwhelming to Miss ---- who had so often witnessed the pomp and heartlessness of city funerals. Every heart seemed pre-eminently to pity her, and every eye kindled with respect and esteem for one whose love death could not abate, nor the cold grave chill.

The patriarchal simplicity of these mountain interments is irresistibly affecting. The vast multitude of people, and sympathy which pervades the whole without any exception, and the almost entire absence of any artificial pomp, render such a scene one of the most impressive that can be imagined. Around the pale remains of Charles H--- stood long ranks of young men who had been his former acquaintances and friends. On their shoulders he was now to be borne to a burying ground half a mile distant. There, too, were hundreds of maidens with souls too full of emotion for language when they approached the wreck of youthful hope and promise--a wreck of which they dreamed not the fearful extent. Yet, with all their weeping, perhaps as many tears flowed on account of a pale lovely mourner whose blasted love was dressed out in each imagination with more than mortal constancy and purity, as on account of him whom they should see no more on earth.

The prayer was made in a balcony commanding the immense crowd gathered around--and then the procession moved to the place of burial. Their steps were slow--their music the hushed beatings of the heart, as they moved to the land of silence. The field of graves swarmed with those who expected one day to rest themselves there from worldly toils. The coffin was lowered into the grave, and a young minister, standing on its brink, lifted a voice of warning so loud and earnest that its tones seemed to rebound from a hill that rose abruptly on the north, over-hanging that quiet resting place. His views of the shortness of human life and of the boundless eternity beyond were startling and tremendous; and when he painted the judgment morning, many an eye gave a terrified and hurried look at the sky above them.

Just before the earth closed upon the dead, a white hand with maniac suddenness threw a pale wild flower into the grave; a faint shriek succeeded, and the insensible mourner was borne from the field.

CHAPTER VIII.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair, meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side;

In the cold moist earth we laid her when the forest cast the leaf,

And wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;

Yet not unmeet it was, that one, like that young friend of ours,

So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

A neat slab of white marble was erected over the dust of Charles, and a few flowering shrubs planted there to bloom in spring and fade in autumn. Miss W--- visited this spot every day; but the increasing paleness of her countenance, and the abstraction of her thoughts suggested to her friends the propriety of her removal to another scene. Her soul seemed to be wedded to the dead, and a not ungentle influence was drawing her downwards to the tomb. Her father's carriage stood one morning at the gate of the Green Mountain mansion, awaiting her return to the city. She had been with Marion to pay a last visit to the hallowed spot where her lover was sleeping the sleep of death. Her emotions had been of a most exciting character; her flushed cheek and lustrous eye formed a startling contrast with her almost habitual paleness; and Marion was startled to hear her speak as if in earnest conversation with the departed. She spoke like one already in eternity--as one whose earthly passions had subsided on the farthest shores of time, and who now was inhaling the atmosphere of immortality. Her farewell to that spot, rendered so sacred to her by love and sorrow, was more like a triumph than a parting. Marion treasured her wonderful expressions in her heart as she would have gathered up the inspirations of a prophetess.

Miss W---'s visit to the home of Charles had removed a dark cloud from her mind. The blasting circumstances of her lover's death had formed the chief bitterness of the event; it had been an ugly reality, casting the shade of dishonor even upon her attachment to him;--yet when her constancy had borne her through her first dreadful revulsions of pride and virtue, and when she had witnessed the sincere and respectful tributes paid to the memory of her beloved dead by the thousands who had known his early worth and mourned his exit, she became reassured, and her love was more ardent than ever. It was now a holy passion.

Her return from the country was followed by an immediate note of invitation to me to favor her father's family with an interview. I went--and was shocked with the sudden conviction flashing through my mind that a consumptive was before me. I have seen death in a hundred rugged, distorted forms of dissolution, and have become skillful in detecting its silent as well as more apparent approaches; and I have seen all without tears save one. I could not but weep when I felt the certainty that another victim of this tragedy was soon to follow those who had gone before. I was more alarmed at the eagerness of mind with which she gathered up again and again the details of the dying hour of her lover; she was never weary in hearing me repeat his last message to her. From these circumstances I lost all hope of her continuance among the living, and took an early opportunity to reveal to her father and mother my premonitions of her death. They were astonished and afflicted beyond measure. They had thought her decline arose from the peculiar nature of her sorrow and the sensibility of her mind, but had never dreamed that their only child was filleted for the tomb. The most skilful physicians were immediately in attendence; a gentle change of scene, and a shifting of the subjects of contemplation were tried in vain; she was a wounded dove, and the arrow was quivering in her heart.

A heavenly-minded clergyman, whose doctrines distilled as the dew, came with his spiritual consolations, and by his pious counsels assisted Miss W--- in that last preparation for a change of worlds, without which the most healthy are unsafe and the sick hopeless.

I saw her but once more. It was in autumn as the leaves were changing. I entered her room where she was bolstered up to look at the sun which was sinking low over the hills in the west. Never could it be possible that an earthly spot should be more filled with the presence of holiness than that chamber. There was an indescribable fragrance in the room, as if one of the most precious flowers was fading away in its loveliness and embalming the atmosphere with its odor. She was most sweetly contemplating the love--the love unto death of her Savior--and she felt the mysterious healing of his blood assuaging the wounds which sin and worldly idolatry had inflicted. With peculiar emphasis she asked me to repeat all the last words of Charles relating to his God and to eternity. When I had summed them up, a ravishing smile of gratitude glowed on her features. What, said she, was the last word that he uttered before the death-struggle came on? It was your name, my dear friend, said I: he seemed to be pleading with you for forgiveness.

Seven days after this interview, I was summoned as a friend to attend the last obsequies of the dead. At her own request her funeral was attended but by few, and every circumstance of pomp and splendor was omitted. It was near sunset as we followed this withered flower to the family vault beneath ----'s church. The subterranean passages were lighted with lamps, and as we approached the vault in which as yet no relics of humanity had ever reposed, we lingered at the sound of strange music, which, far distant, like those dreamy "thoughts which wander through eternity," scarcely broke upon the ear of life. It was the organ in the church above, playing a sweetly mournful dirge. We stood entranced by the mellowness and distant sweetness of the higher strains, and only when the organist descended to the low notes did the rocks over our heads seem to vibrate with the jarring torrent of sound. It was the strange song of death, swelling louder and louder until a melancholy echo awoke in the dull chambers of the deaf sleepers around us. The organ was breathing a far distant tone, echoing like a voice retreating to another world, charming itself away to immortality. Bewildered in soothing strains, the organist was entranced; he had caught a soft Æolian strain of celestial minstrelsy--yet oh, how distant, and yet how sweet, it trembled in its own agony of pleasure, and thrilled in its heaven born ecstacy. Soon it glowed into power,--humbled, softened, subdued power; it discoursed like a solemn, sweet voiced angel clothed in resurrection glory. One tender, melancholy, tearful, yet comforting spirit came down on the little band of friends as at the day when the cloven tongues, lambent and flickering, sat in serrated ranks over apostolic heads. But ah, it was not the baptism of the Holy Ghost unto joy--it was unto sorrow--unto weeping--yet withal so strangely blended with comfort every heart was sensible of that which no language hath power to tell; the deep unfathomable eye, chastened into translucent purity by emotion, only spoke out in an expressive silence the thoughts of that heavenly hour.

The diapason of the organ rolled trumpet-like and heavy upon the startled mourners, recalling them to mortal scenes again--to the way-worn, star-lighted earth, where death like the snaky lerna twined multiformed and sinuous under every seeming flower to sting with mortal venom the fair forms of beauty and loveliness that wandered for a brief day through earthly bowers. They came back to earth again, those rapt souls that fled away on devotion's dewy wings; and the grave rose on their vision, and the semblance of one who was to fill its silent, sacred chambers.

A beautiful tablet of a snow-white Italian marble may be seen in the wall of the church immediately over the tomb where we laid an only daughter, in the twentieth year of her age; it bears a name which the writer has not dared to imprint on this page. Let another hand rend the frail disguise which but half conceals the individuals connected with this narrative.

Here endeth the tale of sorrow and of warning.

Every circumstance of this last death was faithfully transmitted to the family of Judge H---; and the country around, far and near, rung with the mournful tidings. And now, clothed with high romantic interest, without a single satin of dishonor, the history of these events, invested with more than legendary authority, has passed into the annals of the Green Mountains. The traveller oft will hear the tale; he may pause over the monument of the unfortunate, and early, and suddenly ruined, Charles; and he may shed tears before a holier shrine--that on which female loveliness and virtue was rendered up an offering fit for heaven. How appropriate to these early and lamented deaths would be the pensive lines of Virgil:--

------------Manibus data lilia plenis:

Purpureos spargam flores, animamque nepotis

His saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani

Munere.

CHAPTER IX.

Alike, beneath thine eye,

The deeds of darkness and of light are done;

High towards the star-lit sky

Towns blaze,--the smoke of battle blots the sun,--

The night-storm on a thousand hills is loud,--

And the strong wind of day doth mingle sea and cloud.

On thy unaltering blaze,

The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,

Fixes his steady gaze,

And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;

And they who stray in perilous wastes, by night,

Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.

And, therefore, bards of old,

Sages, and hermits of the solemn wood,

Did in thy beams behold,

A beauteous type of that unchanging good,

That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray

The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.

Nature has her changes, indeed, but she has also her apparently unchanging features which ever look down in sublimity upon the vicissitudes of human life. The stars on which the Chaldean gazed until his soul drank deep into the influences of a strange divinity, still shine, cold and unchanged, on the desolate plains of Shinar. There are also moral lights, living principles, which are indestructible,--shining on from age to age with the same immortal value, although all beneath them may be vaccillating and erroneous.

It has no less of sublimity when we call up the image of moral truth on which Enoch leaned in his walk with God, than when we gaze upon a natural object on which "the world's gray fathers" looked. The permanency of the great points in the natural world gives promise that the frame-work of the universe is sound, and will sustain the purposes for which it was created;--the fixedness of the great axioms in morals is an anchor which moors the soul safely in the ocean of eternity.

The sons and daughters of virtue are not depressed and discouraged in their high and self-denying career by the adverse fates of their companions whom the winds of tempation may have driven on the rocks of ruin. It has become an admitted truth that a certain course of living will result in mental quiet and advancement;--while it is equally certain that a different course will result in remorse and degradation. The allotted circumstances of life, such as health, or country, or era of existence, or measure of intellect, are partly beyond our power to alter; but moral virtue and purity of heart will shine conspicuously under all these allotments; we shall be rewarded with peace of mind and the approbation of the monitor God has placed within us, in a ratio proportioned to our sincerity and honesty of purpose, and assiduity of labor.

As in philosophy, so in morals, there is no royal path to eminence. The same powers of mind, the same means of moral culture, the same resistance to the temptations of life,--are required of, and must be excercised by, all who would not suffer their existence to be worse than a blank. The similitude of the elements of mind and character among men renders morals the most certain and definite of the sciences. The wayward impulses of the affections are alike in all ages; the bounds which circumscribe, and the rules which control, these affections are consequently incapable of change.

To many it would seem sufficient that young gentlemen, who have just renounced a country life for the fascinations and snares of a city life, should be referred to that rule of singular efficacy and supernatural power--Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word. This precept, if diligently observed, will no doubt become efficacious in leading the youth who has been pained by a sense of sin and by deplorable acts of impurity to the only remedy; but the suffering which is linked so closely with moral obliquity, and the lapse of time before the full evidences of a true reformation of character may be satisfactorily developed,--demand that measures of prevention be used, as well as the remedial process. The youth, whom vice may have wrecked on the sunken rocks above which the syrens sung their delusive songs, may be saved by the violent and unwearied exertions of friendship or philanthropy; he may be saved by the influences of the benevolent providence of God--but, alas, his memory will not love to linger over the hours of his imminent danger. Better far is it to devote the whole of life's brief space to the work of moral purification and intellectual training, rather than spend its fleeting period in the humiliating and unprofitable work of retrogression and remorse.

There is one trait (we had almost said perfection) of mind that deserves the primary consideration of every young gentleman;--it is moral courage. Some are born with this feature of character, or receive it almost intuitively without culture. Of harsh and unyielding materials, they thrive best in the atmosphere of opposition, and they are frequently found, by the very constitution of their natures, on the side of stern, uncompromising virtue. Others,--the milder and more amiable spirits of our race,--are liable to plunge deep into the folly or madness of the times, in compliance with fashion or the solicitations of companionship. To such a few reflections, suggested by the incidents of the preceding narrative, may not be out of place. The results of experience are the precious jewels of wisdom. The man who has a vessel freighted with an incalculable value studies the chart with a tireless industry; he only sails at random who has nothing to lose.

The exercise of moral courage commands the respect and homage of all who witness it. It is most effectual when most openly and sincerely avowed. The youth who declines an expedition of pleasure and dissipation without disclosing the real causes which control his determination loses the moral benefit and influence of his self-denial. It is scarcely to be apprehended in a community so generally refined and observant of the laws of morality as is ours, that a sincere and confiding avowal of principles or of religious scruples should be met be insult or opprobrium. The young gentleman who should be solicited to join in any amusement or enterprise which his conscience cannot sanction has only to say, in an unassuming yet firm manner, that he must decline the invitation, because he is convinced that such a source of gratification is inconsistent with his duty. There is a native generosity in most hearts that will respond to such an appeal;--and, in general, respect and confidence will be awarded to every open avowal of principle.

But the question how a young man shall guard himself against his internal enemies is one of greater importance, and introduces a different view of this subject. The passions of the youthful are the seeds of happiness or misery implanted in the mind, which, by cultivation and restraint, may produce a luxurious growth of the one--or, by neglect, a wild and overshadowing harvest of the other. These secret enemies require the most vigilant watchfulness. The pleading of the passions are intricate and delusive specimens of sophistry. They present the world and its pleasures in an array of splendor which experience must prove to be fallacious and exaggerated.

Curiosity is a leading passion in youth which denies the wisdom of age, and refuses to take the axioms of antiquity on trust. It is this which urges the youth, whose earlier days have passed away in the virtuous quiet of rural scenes, to try the unknown pleasures of dissipation in a city. The show-bills of pleasure are attractive; the gorgeous flowers of an exciting eloquence are strewn over the descriptions of the spectacles of luxury; poetry lends its enchantment to the delusion; genius brings its priceless incense, which should smoke only on the alters of God, and offers it on the shrines of idolatry; and curiosity, yet unsated, feasts in anicipation upon the untasted banquets which are promised in the groves and temples of a fancied elysium.

The worst feature in the case is that a disappointment of happiness in any single pursuit of pleasure only quickens the resolution to seek it in another; and a disappointment in the last invites to new efforts, which may terminate only when the paralysis of death seals up the the energies of our mortal being.

There are solemn warnings abroad that should fall heavily on the hearts of those amiable young gentlemen who stand on the threshold of life, and count upon future happiness and respectability. The tale of the Green Mountain Annals is but a brief record of a single shipwreck, providentially selected from the thousands of similar ones, where more than wealth and life have been lost. The ocean of human existence has scarcely space enough to float a beacon where each wreck went down. Yet, above this heaving scene, where far more swells are rolled by the sighs of sorrow and misfortune than by the breath of joy, the steady and unfailing light of revelation shines purely and gloriously to enlighten the inexperience of youth, as well as to confirm the footsteps of virtuous age.

Most wondrous book! bright candle of the Lord!

Star of eternity! the only star

By which the bark of man could navigate

The sea of life, and gain the coast of bliss

Securely! only star which rose on time,

And on its dark and troubled billows, still,

As generation, drifting swiftly by,

Succeeded generation, threw a ray

Of heaven's own light, and to the hills of God,

The eternal hills, pointed the sinner's eye.

DEATH'S DOINGS.

We need no sermon to remind us of death.--The noble, the beautiful and the gifted have bowed alike before the pale power which rules our being, and dooms our flesh to dust. Memory has many proofs in store to demonstrate morality. One universal certainty pervades and chills our race--it is that we must die--it is that the green earth we tread upon now shall cease to be pressed by our footsteps, and the places which now know us shall become strangely forgetful that we ever lived and moved within their precincts. Yet, oh, how pleasant it is to remember the dead! With what an omnipotence of power does the frail mortal, who perhaps stands on the brink of the grave and within the hour of his own dissolution, call up from the dead the lovely, spiritual forms of those once dear to him! They come breathing the fragrance of the gentle south; the chill of death is not with them; their features are expressive of tenderness--a solemn, heart-moving tenderness; they are more lovely to the mind's eye than they were even when they stood in the pride and beauty of life.

There is a town in the southern part of Vermont remarkable for its mountainous locality. The tremendous piles of the Green mountains with their evergreen ridges form its western boundary. The rapid branches of the Deerfield river with their dark wild waters roar along the bases of the towering hills, or leap down a rocky precipice in sheets of foam--then shoot out from between their mountain gateways, and form rich, beautiful meadows that well repay the toils of the husbandman. To be sure, winter lingers long upon these giant hills which are as dear to freedom as the rocks and passes of Switzerland;--spring comes late, and the summer is fervid, and the autumnal frosts are early,--yet there is a freshness in the air, a sweetness in the waters, a sublimity in the majestic outlines of the scenery that render it an exciting residence. The very storms are grand. The mountain wind has a lion voice amidst the pine, the hemlock, and maple forests. The thunder has a deeper growl as it is re-echoed from hill-top to hill-top, and the clouds that close down upon the mountains throw a darker shade into the vales beneath,--than is wont when the same phenomena are witnessed in more level regions.

In these cradles of the cloud and the storm it may be that the loftiest spirit of American poetry will yet be nursed. Here may be trained some future Demosthenes to rule the storms of human passion, and plead the cause of liberty in tones that may startle a world.

There is yet one worm generated by the piercing chill of this mountain air which often preys upon the loveliest of the Green mountain maidens;--it is the consumption, before whose gnawing venom many of these devoted and beautiful fade away as the honey-suckles of the forest before the tooth of the reptile at their roots.

Twenty years ago, on the evening of the day after the annual Thanksgiving festival, there was the sound of revelry and mirth and dancing in one of the assembly rooms of that town. The younger part of the youthful community had assembled for the giddy mazes of the country dances. About twenty-five couples filled the hall, which was suffused with light, and reverberated to the music of the viols and the clarionet. Beauty, life and gaiety were there. The individuals assembled were intimately acquainted with each other--had been associates in the same school--had met in the same temple of worship that threw up its walls from an adjacent eminence like a light-house to direct the voyager of earth to the skies. The hours flew quite as speedy as the dancers wished. A dark-haired, thoughtful youth was sitting retired in a corner, pensively gazing upon the scene. He was one born for trouble, and perhaps even then some of the coming events of his life "cast their shadows before." He was born for sorrow--yet had a heart to sustain it all, unsubdued, uncrushed,--all, and a thousand fold more than earth could inflict, without a murmur or a plea for human sympathy.--He saw before him three of those graceful, sylph-like forms which are more easily imagined than described. They were slender, delicate, of faultless proportions--of frames so fragile as scarcely to form the medium through which the emotions and deeds of the soul might be discovered, imparting gladness and vivacity to the beholder. Envy dwelt not in these almost transparent bosoms. Kindness, affection, every native grace and virtue, were personified in these three forms, so unlike each other, and yet so much surpassing all around them. The gazer's eyes were rivetted upon them as they stood side by side at the head of the dance--when suddenly a clock in anti-chamber struck the the dull hour of midnight. A deep oppression and heaviness was on his heart and a mist came before his eyes; and, instead of the three cheerful and love-breathing forms on which he had been so eagerly looking, there seemed to stand in their places, three faded resemblances of the living--but they were only the dull shadows of the dead. Starting with horror almost from his seat, the youth immediately perceived that it was a hallucination or optical deception. There was no death there--but the same lively and sparkling eyes beamed on him as before. The impression of horror had, however, been too deeply imprinted to be effaced in a moment. The music sounded mournful and dirgelike in his ears, and the pageantry was dim in his eyes until near morning, when the gay scene shifted, and silence reigned in the hall but lately so full of motion and joy.

It was only the following summer that this same youth was seen walking, with unsteady and faltering step, on the green before the church on a Sabbath day. He was anxiously looking towards the south as if in expectation of catching sight of some spectacle of deep interest. It came. It was a long funeral procession bearing the body of the amiable and lamented Arabella B---, the one who had stood at the head of the dance. The coffin was borne on the shoulders of a long array of young men, who relieved each other at short intervals--and when the writer felt the weight of one so dear press upon him it seemed as if he would have sunk to the earth, as lifeless as the pale remains of the dead. With tearful eyes and bosom swelled and choked with emotion, he saw only the pebbles and stones of the street until he had reached the field of graves.--There they left her to sleep her long sleep, so deep in the dust that the murmurs of a little brook which washes the sides of this quiet resting place, can never break upon the dull, cold ear of death--so deep that the whispers of the wind through the tops of some somber looking firs, near at hand, shall never disturb her dreamless repose. He had never the courage to ask her relatives if, in her last hours--in her farewell communings with time, she had ever pronounced his name.

No great length of time had elapsed before a party was made up to ascend one of the highest peaks of the Green mountains, situated in the extreme northwest corner of the town. It is a wild pyramid of rocks rising to an elevation of about three thousand feet above the waters of the Deerfield river. Ascending the mountain from the south, the acclivity is so gradual that a party may ride on horses until within the distance of a half a mile from the summit--then, the visitor must clamber up the face of steep rocks, or penetrate through overhanging caverns, to reach the top, when an overwhelming prospect gushes on his view. The far-off White Hills of New Hampshire, the solemn Monadnock, the course of the Connecticut river on the east, and the frowning piles of the Catskill on the west, are within the limits of vision. This party had climbed about half way up the peak, distinctively called the Haystack, and stood on a rock that overhung an unfathomable chrystal lake of water, of about two miles in circuit, which is cradled as it were in the very bosom of the mountain, almost in the region of the clouds. The writer suddenly looked at the engaging and sprightly Lucy H---, one of the party, and the one who had stood second in the ball chamber, and saw a frightful paleness on her countenance. She looked like the very phantom of the midnight reverie at the dance. It was with much difficulty that she was assisted to gain the summit, so oppressive were the palpitations of her heart, and her sensations of faintness. Her visage was fallen and sad throughout the day; and we saw her not again until she was on her death-bed. Reduced to a shadow by the consumption, with all her lustre dimmed, and her earthly prospects blighted, she died--and her remains on the way to interment pressed more heavily on the heart than on the shoulders. She was laid where--

It is more than fourteen years since the writer last saw the third affectionate and endearing nymph of the ball room. At that time she was in the bosom of the christian church, a fragrant flower housed from the storms either of time or eternity. Her name was Minerva L---, and never was there a being more gentle and better furnished with those sweet graces of womanhood. She too is dead. Years have flown since the consumption,

------Like a worm in the bud,

Preyed on her damask cheek.

Separated by envious distance from the scene of life's early joys, the writer cannot go into the details of this last death. What were her peculiar sorrows--what shaft of disappointed love rankled in her bosom--or what triumphs of celestial hope shone on her pale forehead,--are to him unknown.

Summoned by memory's unwasting power these three forms of loveliness and youthful innocence are before me now. Not a feature which bore the bright impress of the soul is wanting. I raise my hands to embrace them--it is thin air!

THE MATERIALIST.

He was a young student of one of our country colleges, had been educated in a genteel rather than a religious family, and felt the pride of a graceful exterior, a cultivated intellect, and that ease of manners which so irresistibly commands the notice and secures the attention of all. My friend had deeply studied the principles and affinities of material objects, deeply studied them, and his powerful mind had become so absorbed in the habit of requiring absolute demonstration, or evidence tangible to the senses, that he considered the human being as only a certain combination of matter, subject to a set of rules of action or principles that might have been generated by the specific material of which man was compoesd, and was inseparable from it. His reasoning was this: A stone has a certain principle connected with its materiality which governs it, whether in motion or at rest, called by the philosopher the principle of gravitation;--by analogy, that mass of matter called man has a governing principle, which took its rise in the peculiar organization of his frame, called intelligence or intellectuality. Here he rested; and knew, and wished to know, nothing further.

I walked with him up a lofty mountain, and watched his countenance as we neared the upper regions, and saw the beautiful valley, its lovely village, and the domes of its colleges apparently beneath our feet. Nature was wrestling in his bosom, and pleading for a deeper emotion than materialism allows its disciple. His soul was wandering on the eagle wing of thought, like an arrow shot from a strong bow upwards. I seized the holy moment, and said--How stupendously grand is our footstool! Look just behind us and see that solemn thunder-cloud, coming up dark and heavily, like a background of thick darkness. Now see that keen flash of lightning. Continuing, I said--this huge bulk of mountain on which we stand is matter--that sombre cloud is matter--that keen glance of lightning is matter; they are all matter, and yet how diverse!

His attention was eagerly fixed;--he found me on the ground of materialism, and felt as if he should receive new strength from my remarks.--But, I continued, this diversity in the nature of matter forbodes terrible things to the materialist. The same maker who created a mountain, and made it indestructible to the winds, created the rock and made it insoluble in water, and made the lightning like a spear which he glances out from its sheath of cloud, can make matter of a fearful power and capacity. The very soul within you, my dear friend, which "smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its point," may be a refined state of material organization--as the wind, whose effects, but not whose form, we can see. Matter, in this spiritual shape, may have been made--yea, it is created--indestructible. My friend, said I, tenderly, can you not conceive that a part of this rock on which we stand, if it were changed into a pure, brilliant diamond, and then hung up out of the reach of the attrition or corrosion of elemental conflict, in some quiet nook beneath the calm-eyed stars, might retain its form until a million of years had exhausted their contents, and another million, and another million been added to the items of an opening eternity?

His attention was deep and solemn. I then took out my pocket bible, and said,--this too is matter--truth is matter--and we have supposed that spirit might be matter so pure as to be beyond the reach of destruction. I read to him in an affectionate manner, while my voice was softened and subdued by a heavenly spirit that had come upon me with thrilling energy, from the sacred word which has been the sword of the spirit to millions and millions. I began with the denunciations against sin--and ended with the tender sayings of Jesus to his disciples, just before he was laid on the altar of sacrifice, himself the bleeding victim.

I then paused, and, slowly turning to look on my friend, I found him bathed in tears. The cloud, said I, is matter, and from its deep, black bosom, matter, in a more fearfully refined form, is leaping in terrific energy. This book, too, is matter; but, from its sublime and immortal pages, the sharp flash of truth breaks out and smites against the proud heart of man. Oh, how ignorant we are! How proudly do we talk about materiality who have scarcely seen the outskirts of creation!

My friend was weeping like a cloud that had been rent by a mountain cliff. He wept his hardness of heart away, and we went down into the vale together, feeling like very children, blessing God that although ignorant, we had a precious bible to instruct us.

A FRAGMENT.

The sun was sinking beneath the western crags of the mountains, bathing them in floods of mellow, golden-colored light. Nature was baptized with the departing glories of the day, and her last dress, which was to precede the sober night-robe, was her richest and most effulgent. The mockeries of pearl and diamond, now placed side by side with the real gems of creation, the lovely gleamings and kindlings of the many-hued source of light, were lustreless imitations,--and the glory of the heavens asserted its living supremacy over the beautiful and choicest combinations of earthly origin. The mild, sweet spirit of universal complacency ruled the hour, and suggested to the reflecting mind those deep and glowing thoughts that seem more like the communings of the blessed ones of eternity than the inspirations of natural scenery.

In the full blaze of this splendor and under the highest excietements of time and place, a student of Williams' College was slowly ascending one of those sublime mountain pinacles that environ the valley sacred to literature and hallowed associations. He would pause from time to time, and connect the proud moral sublimity of the vale below him,--a vale that shall dwell in the memory of man when Tempe's fabled imagery shall have faded from the dreams of poetry,--with the natural sublimity around him. He remembered that forty classes of students had trod the shady groves beneath him, and gazed upon the mountain whose height he was scaling. The same circle of vision that greeted his eyes at the going down of the sun had been eagerly swept a thousand times by eyes now now closed to time, but open to immorality. Samuel J. Mills, Gordon Hall, Richards, King, and a constellation of other names that have been distinguished on the four great continents of the earth for deeds of beneficence and grandeur, were fresh in his memory, as having once been the tenants of those piles that were embosomed in the fragrant vale through which the gentle Hoosick rolled its waves of silver. Besides these reminiscences of high and noble spirits, there was an inclosure in his view that contained the white monuments of the dead. It was a lovely resting place--yet saddened by the blasting of early promise, and moistened with the tears of genius.

Now came upon the mind of this wanderer the threefold impressions of the scenery of nature, the scenery of death, and the grandeur of moral associations. It was a battery of more than Voltaic power, directed full and clear upon his heart, to which one avenue had as yet been left unclosed amidst the dangers and hardening of a course of life in which dissipation had begun to mingle its ingredients. The high claims of his long violated conscience were asserted in the hour of his lonely meditation at eventide. The admonitions of his far distant parents who dwelt towards the setting of the sun came rolling over his heart like the tones of long remembered music. A father's prayer and a mother's blessing came gliding in the level rays of sunshine that seemed to sweep the hill-tops only of the land of freedom. It was a soothingly solemn season in which tears of penitence fell upon the mountain rocks like the diamond dew drops. The first prayer of the returning prodigal was uttered here. Here was a soul awakened to the long forgotten duties of religion.

It was not many months from the date of this before a shower of divine influence fell upon the college, and the gifted and accomplished submitted themselves by tens and twenties to the glorious government of God--and thenceforward looked heavenward for a crown of immortality with a confidence that temptation could not weaken, nor yet the agony of death overcome.

The lovely plain still spreads its bosom heaving with flowers and fragrant umbrage. The lofty mountains still guard the retreats of science and literature from the sweeping winds that may have dusted a continent in their course. The setting sun still lends a celestial radiance to the crested summits of those sublime watch-towers. Still may the solitary student climb the steep to stand alone with heaven upon the high and holy mountain altar. Still the white inclosure of monuments tells eloquently of the shortness of life and of the repose of the grave. And where on this western continent can there be found a scenery more allied to the weighty yet calm associations of moral grandeur.

On the banks of the Hoosick, and within the compass of this sequestered vale, the gigantic spirit of American missions was prayed into being. Here India, with her forlorn and unsanctified millions, came freshly into remembrance through the intercessions of a chosen band. Here the grand design to raise Africa from the dust and humiliation of centuries was born in the bosom of Mills. Here were the immortal conceptions of benevolence nourished, until the wide seas, and the distant islands and continents, were gladdened by their consummation.

There are many plain white monuments in the grave yard, which stand over the dust of students, cut down in their promise and beauty, while life and its inspiriting associations had only opened before them. I pass lightly by these flowers of mortality nipped in the bud and consigned to darkness before they had known the splendors, the disappointments, the toils, the miseries of life. Of each one of them perhaps some aged inhabitant could say :--

One morn I miss'd him on the 'customed hill,

Along the heath, and near his favorite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;--

The next with dirges due in sad array,

Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.

There are two monuments, however, which, although not those of students, have yet a romantic interest from their connection with collegiate fortunes.

THE TWO MONUMENTS.

Near the centre of the field of graves stands the most magnificent pile of marble which adorns that portion of the land of silence. It is of elegant proportions, surmounted by an urn, and bearing on each of its four entablatures inscriptions in the languages of France and Rome. The name of an accomplished lady, with her French family title, is conspicuous on its southern front. While living she was the wife of Professor M---, formerly of Williams' College. Her romantic history is worthy, even brief as it is, of a place in the Green Mountain Annals.

Her father was one of the noble French gentlemen who were the earliest settlers of Lower Canada, and brought with them from chivalrous France their hereditary distinctions, their accomplished manners, and their religion. He was possessed of the seniority of some of the valuable islands that are embosomed in the majestic St. Lawrence;--consequently his fortune was large for those times, and he was able to educate his children in conformity with the expectations of their birth. His only daughter, a lovely girl of seventeen, was in one of the nunneries of Montreal, either receiving her education or passing the period of probation usually imposed on those who take the veil and the vows of perpetual celibacy. A young Catholic clergyman saw her there in the bloom of her beauty;-- he saw and loved with a passion paramount to his love for the altar. The fervor of his attachment entirely overcame his young ambition to rise in the grades of ecclesiastical preferment to an eminence worthy of a zealous advocate of the church Apostolic. She became his heaven--his idolatry--his all. Climbing the convent walls, and and removing the iron grating from the windows on a stormy night, he received in his arms all for whom he lived and moved and had a being, and commenced a flight through the wilderness to the United States, not daring to trust himself and his thrice precious charge on the public road--as he well knew the deadly power of the church whose lion-voiced thunders would roar against his sacrilege and perjury--and well he knew the strength of paternal prejudice. Through dark and devious and tangled woods he bore his captured prize almost literally in his arms, and guarded her from harm amidst forests that nightly resounded to the howl of the famishing wolf. At length reaching the boundaries of the State of Vermont, where the arm of Catholicism was powerless, he succeeded in obtaining conveyance to Bennington, one of the oldest towns in the State. Here he took lodgings for his dearer self; and having reason to suspect that an infuriated father and the minions of papacy were prowling the country for the double purpose of rescuing the spoil and for assassination, he was accustomed to spend the day alone in the woods, but would return at night, making his couch outside her room at the entrance of her door, with the most respectful delicacy, so that the prowler who should attempt to bear away his beloved must of necessity walk over his body. So much propriety of manner and strength of attachment secured this amiable and accomplished pair the good will and generous friendship of all to whom their interesting situation became known. The bold, free-hearted inhabitants of the Green mountains pledged them not only the security of their laws, but the still stronger defence of popular will. They were advised to marry, which was only deferred with a faint hope of bringing about a reconciliation with her father, who was ascertained to be at Albany. Mr. M---, attended by some resolute friends, resolved to meet him there. The father in a tone of rage and imprecation demanded of M--- where his daughter was, and was answered that the secret of her residence rested only in the faithful bosom of her lover. The enraged father drew a dagger, and made a desperate plunge at the breast of M---, which was unhesitatingly bared to the blow that would have taken instant effect had not the iron arm of a Green mountaineer interposed. The father was given to understand that his own safety depended on his immediate return or quiet conduct. He chose to pour out the full chalice of paternal curses upon his daughter and M---, but heaven did not ratify the imprecation.

The marriage ceremony was performed on the return of M--- to Bennington, and measures immediately entered upon to gain a livelihood. M--- learned the art of bookbinding and opened a bookstore. His lovely and delicate wife plied the needle, and happiness, as great as this world can offer to mortals, cheered them onward through labors to which they had never been accustomed.

It was not long before a higher station awaited the accomplished and virtuous M---. The faculty of Williams' College offered him the Professorship of the French language and the office of Librarian, which were gladly accepted and filled for many years under the Presidency of Dr. Fitch. An only son, who is now one of the most eloquent and accomplished sons of Massachusetts, received his education at the college which sheltered his father in his days of banishment and poverty.

But the time of relenting was at hand. Her aged father had heard of the respectability of his unacknowledged son and daughter, and his affection overcame the sternness of his bigotry; he came to Williamstown, and sealed his forgiveness by a gift of fifty thousand dollars. At the old gentleman's death, some time after, the seniority of large landed possessions were among the bequests of a father to his expatriated son and daughter.

At length the hour came when the lovely woman and affectionate mother must put "off this mortal coil." She was buried with the imposing funeral ceremonies of the Roman church. A hundred tapers shone around her lifeless clay, lighting the pale statuary of death.

A chastened and almost classical affection has presided over the erection of this monument, which is, perhaps, a cenotaph to commemorate her name and virtues where the pure and lofty minded resort to breathe evening's holy air at the foot of the everlasting hills that throw their deep shadows over the wearied, worn-out sleepers in the vale.

A white and plain monument stands only a little distance from its more splendid rival--yet it tells a tale of private grief and heart-corroding sorrow. The idolatry of a woman's affection to the object of her love often proves her ruin;--for it is not consonant to the will of heaven that the purest treasures of the heart should be wasted on earthborn objects. The rich and holy feelings that should kindle into lively action only when uncreated beauty is the subject of contemplations may not be concentrated on man--the frail, imperfect being of an hour. The earth has ever proved a broken reed, piercing those who leaned upon it with keenest sorrows; and the more ardent and confiding the temperament, the more bitter the pangs of disappointment.

The elegant and eloquent T--- was a student, who bore away each palm of victory that waved at the end of the modern Olympian races of intellect. The native strength and acuteness of his mental faculties made acquisition in science or literature almost an act of intuition. It was surprising--absolutely incomprehensible--how he became master of the recondite demonstrations of science without the struggles and nearly without the habits of a student. The lessons which he had never seen were mastered by his retentive mind during the single hour of recitation, and then he hastened to the bowers of the muses, or essayed the powers of a lofty and powerful eloquence. It was as easy for him, when called upon by the college faculty to read an essay, to read it from a sheet of unwritten paper, as from one which his pen had traced; and the versatility of his genius gave him an equal celebrity in the different departments of mental culture or acquisition. He was a giant in mind,--yet his manners were bland and graceful, and many of the hours devoted by his classmates to the severe readings of philology and philosophy were spent by him in the company of the lovelier sex. In such society he appeared like a being all soul and fascination. He scarcely needed to "stoop to conquer," for he had a double portion of that power which binds the heart at will and enslaves the affections.

Capable of accomplishing vastly more than the ordinary mass of mankind in a given space of time, it is not wonderful that on the evening of the day in which he bore away the diploma and highest collegiate honors of his class he should also have led to the altar of hymen, Miss S---, one of the most accomplished and popular belles of the village. Well might she have looked proudly around her and counted on the rich stores of her present and future happiness. The prospective of her destiny was to the beholder like one of those dreamy and glorious scenes drawn by the artist under Grecian or Italian skies, where the streaming effulgence of heaven rests like a calm vision upon the classic scenery, and diffuses the hues of rainbow beauty through the stained and mellow atmosphere.

She loved to adoration and was soon doomed to feel that worst of women's woes, the withering flame of jealousy. One like him, born for mankind, for the age, for his country,--could not but excite admiration and command friends wherever he moved. He had chosen a profession which leads the most directly to the conflicts and aspirations of political life; and it will not excite wonder, if, in the ardent chase for the honors and emoluments which ambition holds out to its votaries, his attentions to his bosom companion should have diminished.

Henceforward dark suspicions and disappointment that would recognise no healing art or soothing process became irrevocably her portion. Genius, like an estranged minister, deserted the altar of love to burn mid-night incense on the altar of ambition. She became insensible to the charms of society--her heart was wrecked, and the waves of a silent sorrow drowned her soul.

It was not among the least afflicting circumstances of the case that when the eagle-minded T--- had discovered this sickliness of soul creeping over his once beloved wife, he could not comprehend the cause of the change. His was a heart not long to worship on a single altar. If love had been his earlier passion, ambition now was his daystar, and prompted all his actions. He could scarcely restrain his contempt for that moody and unalterable sorrow which preys upon the mind of a sensitive female who imagines that her interest in the affections of the lord of her heart is on the decline. It would, perhaps, have been better, had not cold, studied neglect been added to silent contempt.

Years--few in number, yet plenteous in sorrow--wore on; and the disappointed, heart-broken Mrs. T--- came back to her father's mansion--to die. It was at this period that these few particulars of this domestic tragedy transpired. The amiable but sorrowful woman came back, not as she had departed with every prospect gladsome and spirit-stirring around her; she came back with the long wished for certainty of the grave before her. She would see the faces of none of her former associates. She only wished to lie down in the retirement of her maiden chamber, and fade silently and unnoticed from living things. She was not what she had been. The cold paralysis of the heart and affections had rendered her more fit for the society of the sheeted dead than for the living. It was a case of mental stupor, unenlivened by a single ray of hope. She had not even the joys of delirium to beguile one moment of her existence.

One cold rainy afternoon, when the huge piles of leaden colored clouds hung on the Green mountain piles, and a weary dispiriting gloom brooded over the vale, the tidings rang through the mansion that this daughter of sorrow was no more. Not a single ray of religious comfort had been known to cheer her departing moments. It was, indeed, more than suspected that she had hastened her own exit by laudanum.

The funeral occasion called the eloquent and admired T--- to the scene of his former classic triumphs. He was still the pride and boast of his alma mater, and long files of students followed the remains of his lady to the grave. There the fountain of his early affections were opened, and he wept in agony as he bowed his head over a son too young to enter deeply into the emotions of the scene. As far as the eye of the public could scan the sincerity of his grief, it was genuine--heartfelt.

From this period we heard of his upward progress in a course of honorable ambition. Suspicion dared not breathe aught derogatory to his fame. The grasp of his intellect still surpassed in vigor and tenacity the most favored of his race. He stood at length in a high post of legal advancement; and might have been envied by those who had ascended the proudest eminence of ambition for the applauses which were sure to follow his acts, at once so full of grace, dignity and science. Whatever he did was conspicuous for the beauty of creation; wherever he turned, genius gave new glory and success to his enterprises. He might have reached any assignable point on the scale of earthly distinction.

Suddenly--without a reason being offered--the high and influential office which T--- had so honorably filled, was resigned; and a grieved and astonished public had to learn the fact that he was a drunkard.

Whether the judgment of heaven came upon him in consequence of the idolatry of his ambition--or whether a woman's curse, which is said to be deep and dreadful, clung to his destiny, it is not for us to inquire. He still lives--yet, alas, he has struggled through a number of undistinguished years. Rising at times in the majesty of his intellect, the demon of intoxication has been compelled to retreat from the terror of his eye, and "Richard was himself again."-- Yet it cannot be concealed that the intervals of temperance have been divided from each other by the pestilent waves of strong drink. As his virtues and moral powers rose to a lofty elevation, so his vices have descended to an extreme on the scale of ruin. It may be now that he has at length quite escaped from the jaws of Cerebus, and breathes again the sober air of heaven and moral freedom. But what arm has power to roll back the past, and break the locks which contain the squandered treasures of years?

The associations lingering round this simple stone, which does not give even a hint of the mental suffering which agitated the pale sleeper beneath it, are painful and melancholy in the extreme. The extermination of life, in such a case, is not all of death. Life embittered--happiness destroyed--the sweet light of the sun darkened--the fountain of the affection poisoned,--and shadows, dark as eternal night, drawn over this world and the next, are mingled in this gloomy picture. Ah, let her weary frame rest here in silence. Her head, pillowed on the gravel, does not now feel the pains of mortality--it aches no more. Jealousy--that green-eyed monster--no longer gnaws upon her heart.--She rests along with the brave, the youthful, the beautiful, the learned,--and every little stone and mound around her tomb are, like hers, connected with a tale of the heart. These biographies are all written in the books of the judgment, and shall be promulgated in the "day of dread decision--and despair." Till then let us say farewell to this scenery of death! Farewell to these Green mountain summits--the homes of the eagle--the thrones of the couchant thunderclouds.

Hark! as my lingering footsteps slow retire--

Some spirit of the air has waked thy string;

'Tis now a seraph bold, with touch of fire,

'Tis now the brush of Fairy's frolic wing.

Receding now, the dying numbers ring

Fainter and fainter down the rugged dell,

And now the mountain breezes scarcely bring

A wandering witch-not of the distant spell--

And now, 'tis silent all! Enchantress, fare the well!