For our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die
alternately, and death is but "the pause when the blast is
recollecting itself."
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook,
in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was
pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in its story,
which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer,
and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its
din. But the rill, whose
"Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,"
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier
streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with
sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes
up no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a
thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before.
It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give
me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream
ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I
received that compensation which I had never obtained in my
waking hours.
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