But all this while a younger love, with no blurred leaves to erase from the chronicle, has been keeping sweet account of the summer time. "Very near are two hearts that have no guile between them," saith a proverb, traced back to Confucius. O ye days of still sunshine, reflected back from our selves! O ye haunts endeared evermore by a look, tone, or smile, or rapt silence, when more and more with each hour unfolded before me that nature, so tenderly coy, so cheerful though serious, so attuned by simple cares to affection, yet so filled, from soft musings and solitude, with a poetry that gave grace to duties the homeliest, setting life's trite things to Music! Here nature and fortune concurred alike,-- equal in birth and pretensions, similar in tastes and in objects, loving the healthful activity of purpose, but content to find it around us, neither envying the wealthy nor vying with the great, each framed by temper to look on the bright side of life and find founts of delight and green spots fresh with verdure where eyes but accustomed to cities could see but the sands and the mirage. While afar, as man's duty, I had gone through the travail that, in wrestling with fortune, gives pause to the heart to recover its losses and know the value of love in its graver sense of life's earnest realities, Heaven had reared, at the thresholds of home, the young tree that should cover the roof with its blossoms and embalm with its fragrance the daily air of my being. It had been the joint prayer of those kind ones I left that such might be my reward, and each had contributed, in his or her several way, to fit that fair life for the ornament and joy of the one that now asked to guard and to cherish it. From Roland came that deep, earnest honor,--a man's in its strength, and a woman's in its delicate sense of refinement. From Roland, that quick taste for all things noble in poetry and lovely in nature,--the eye that sparkled to read how Bayard stood alone at the bridge and saved an army; or wept over the page that told how the dying Sidney put the bowl from his burning lips. Is that too masculine a spirit for some? Let each please himself. Give me the woman who can echo all thoughts that are noblest in men! And that eye, too,--like Roland's,--could pause to note each finer mesh in the wonderful web-work of beauty. No landscape to her was the same yesterday and to-day: a deeper shade from the skies could change the face of the moors; the springing up of fresh wild-flowers, the very song of some bird unheard before, lent variety to the broad rugged heath. Is that too simple a source of pleasure for some to prize? Be it so to those who need the keen stimulants that cities afford. But if we were to pass all our hours in those scenes, it was something to have the tastes which own no monotony in Nature.