in college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination.  The leading characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.  The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged in his person.  In no part of the world have I seen a man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn dignity and elegance of address.  His person was very finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high-bred, and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.  Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular simplicity and taste in dress, and you have the portrait of one who, in other days, would have been the mirror of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and troubadours.  Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory.

...  Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many years of his life which he should have passed either in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were enslaved to the drudgery of business.  His constitution seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood, however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to the beautiful and poetic home of “Sachem’s Wood,” his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a ripe and long enduring career of literature.  In harmony with such a life were all his surroundings—­scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companionship—­and never looked promise fairer for the realization of a dream of glory.  That he had laid out something of such a field in the future, I chance to know, for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a series of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed to work with the first mood and leisure he could command.  And with his scholarship; knowledge of life, taste, and genius, what might not have been expected from its fulfilment?  But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light, just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world.  Love and honor to the memory of such a man.

* * * * *

=_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-. _= (Manual, pp. 503, 505.)

From “Hyperion.”

=_206._= THE INTERRUPTED LEGEND.

One by one the objects of our affection depart from us.  But our affections remain, and like vines stretch forth their broken, wounded tendrils for support.  The bleeding heart needs a balm to heal it; and there is none but the love of its kind,—­none but the affection of a human heart.  Thus the wounded, broken affections of Flemming began to lift themselves from the dust and cling around this new object.  Days and weeks passed; and, like the Student Crisostomo, he ceased to love, because he began to adore.  And with this adoration mingled the prayer, that, in that hour when the world is still, and the voices that praise are mute, and reflection cometh like twilight, and the maiden, in her day dreams, counted the number of her friends, some voice in the sacred silence of her thoughts might whisper his name.