It is a fine sight—­very fine.  There are few finer bays in the world than New York Bay,—­either to look at, or, for that matter, to sleep in.  The ships ride up thickly, dashing about the cold spray delightfully; the little cutters gleam in the November sunshine like white flowers shivering in the wind.

The sky is rich—­all mottled with cold, gray streaks of cloud.  The old apple-women, with their noses frostbitten, look cheerful and blue.  The ragged immigrants, in short trousers and bell-crowned hats, stalk about with a very happy expression, and very short-stemmed pipes; their yellow-haired babies look comfortably red and glowing.  And the trees with their scant, pinched foliage have a charming, summer-like effect!

Amid it all the thoughts of the boudoir, and harpsichord, and goldfinches, and Axminster carpets, and sunshine, and Laura, are so very, very pleasant!  How delighted you would be to see her married to the stout man in the red cravat, who gave her bouquets, and strolled with her on the deck of the steamer upon the St. Lawrence!  What a jaunty, self-satisfied air he wore; and with what considerate forbearance he treated you—­calling you once or twice Master Clarence!  It never occurred to you before, how much you must be indebted to that pleasant, stout man.

You try sadly to be cheerful; you smile oddly; your pride comes strongly to your help, but yet helps you very little.  It is not so much a broken heart that you have to mourn over, as a broken dream.  You seem to see in a hundred ways, that had never occurred to you before, the marks of her superior age.  Above all it is manifest in the cool and unimpassioned tone of her letter.  Yet how kindly withal!  It would be a relief to be angry.

New visions come to you, wakened by the broken fancy which has just now eluded your grasp.  You will make yourself, if not old, at least gifted with the force and dignity of age.  You will be a man, and build no more castles until you can people them with men!  In an excess of pride you even take umbrage at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that engrossing tenderness of which you feel yourself to be capable.  Love shall henceforth be dead, and you will live boldly without it.

——­Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride—­the winter is come early!  But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon our ungrateful heads.

* * * * *

Well it is even so, that the passionate dreams of youth break up and wither.  Vanity becomes tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields to the riper judgment of manhood,—­even as the August heats pass on, and over, into the genial glow of a September sun.  There is a strong growth in the struggles against mortified pride; and then only does the youth get an ennobling consciousness of that manhood which is dawning in him, when he has fairly surmounted those puny vexations which a wounded vanity creates.