AS I look back, boyhood with its griefs and cares vanishes into the proud stateliness of youth. The ambition and the rivalries of the college life—its first boastful importance as knowledge begins to dawn on the wakened mind, and the ripe, and enviable complacency of its senior dignity—all scud over my memory like this morning breeze along the meadows; and like that, too, bear upon their wing a chillness—as of distant ice-banks. Ben has grown almost to manhood; Lilly is living in a distant home; and Isabel is just blooming into that sweet age where womanly dignity waits her beauty; an age that sorely puzzles one who has grown up beside her—making him slow of tongue, but very quick of heart. As for the rest—let us pass on. The sea is around me. The last head-lands have gone down under the horizon, like the city steeples, as you lose yourself in the calm of the country, or like the great thoughts of genius, as you slip from the pages of poets into your own quiet reverie. The waters skirt me right and left; there is nothing but water before, and only water behind. Above me are sailing clouds, or the blue vault, which we call, with childish license—heaven. The sails, white and full, like helping friends are pushing me on: and night and day are distant with the winds which come and go—none know whence, and none know whither. A land bird flutters aloft, weary with long flying; and lost in a world where are no forests but the careening masts, and no foliage but the drifts of spray. It cleaves awhile to the smooth spars, till urged by some homeward yearning, it bears off in the face of the wind, and sinks, and rises over the angry waters, until its strength is gone, and the blue waves gather the poor flutterer to their cold and glassy bosom. All the morning I see nothing beyond me but the waters, or a tossing company of dolphins; all the noon, unless some white sail—like a ghost, stalks the horizon, there is still nothing but the rolling seas; all the evening, after the sun has grown big and sunk under the water line, and the moon risen, white and cold, to glimmer across the tops of the surging ocean—there is nothing but the sea and the sky to lead off thought, or to crush it with their greatness. Hour after hour, as I sit in the moonlight upon the taffrail, the great waves gather far back, and break—and gather nearer, and break louder—and gather again, and roll down swift and terrible under the creaking ship, and heave it up lightly upon their swelling surge, and drop it gently to their seething and yeasty cradle—like an infant in the swaying arms of a mother—or like a shadowy memory upon the billows of manly thought. Conscience wakes in the silent nights of ocean; life lies open like a book, and spreads out as level as the sea. Regrets and broken resolutions chase over the soul like swift-winged night-birds, and all the unsteady heights and the wastes of action lift up distinct and clear from the uneasy but limpid depths of memory.