Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.  This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.

But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of one’s childhood and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often transplanted.

Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;—­their voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  “I am *** *** ***,” she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!—­said I, when I read that first frank declaration,—­you are one of the right sort!—­She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about her,—­the old woman’s “skeleton hand” at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,—­“Ma’am shooing away the hens,”—­the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,—­a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul’s half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer!  Yes,—­pray for her, and for all such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent, which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one’s heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.