Morning! “a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains!” A pale sun lit the earth, but earth and sky were black,—­no sun touched me in heart or eye; I saw nothing, felt nothing, but heavy and impenetrable gloom.  Yet again the ceremonies of life prevailed, and my real life slept undiscovered.  Whatever pallor or shadow lined my face was no stranger there at that hour.  The gray morning passed away; the village on the hill sent down busy sounds of labor and cheer; flies buzzed on the sunny pane, doors clicked and slammed in the house, fires crackled behind the shining fire-dogs.  I went to the library,—­the first breath of air had—­dissipated it!  What a mockery!  I went away,—­out of the house,—­on, anywhere.  Dry leaves rustled in my path and sent up a faint aromatic breath as they were crushed in the undried dew; squirrels chattered in the wood; here and there a dropping nut stirred the silence with deliberate fall, or an unseen grouse whirred through the birches at my approaching step.  The way was trodden and led me by gradual slope and native windings through the dull red oaks downward to the river.  Once on the path, a low cluster of sweet fern attracted me;—­strange assertion of human personality, that in the deepest grief a man knows and notices the trivial features of Nature with microscopic fidelity! that the veining of a leaf or the pencilling of a blossom will attract the eye that no majesty or beauty of unwonted manifestation could light with one appreciative spark!  Is it that the injured and indignant soul so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says, unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, “There is in me a life no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man’s devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement,—­darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown,—­there is that within that God alone can vanquish,—­yours is but a finite terror”?  Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight,—­the dark green leaves of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth,—­the bending sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me, swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind,—­the tiny scarlet cups of moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood,—­the shrinking and wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom,—­every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence,—­the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks,—­the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson:  all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.