lifted their summits in along encircling ridge of pale blue waves.  The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the sky.  This was a sight which had more virtue and refreshment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked upon, I am afraid I must say for years.  I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those who seek its companionship.  But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,—­Monadnock, Kearsarge,—­what memories that name recalls!—­and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children,—­I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts.  It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue mountains, and they “are to me as a feeling” now, and have been ever since.

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground.  It was thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent immigrants of more than a whole generation.  There lay the dead I had left, the two or three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed haunted.  A few upright stones were all that I recollect.  But now, around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered as living.  I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day.  I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like desk.  Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from an older text than any they ever found in Cruden’s Concordance, but there was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never known.  There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the resting-place of one of the children of the very learned Professor Robinson:  “Is it well with the child?  And she answered, It is well.”

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to the gravedigger and his companion.  They christened a mountain or two for me, “Kearnsarge” among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of which the most curious was “Basil’s Cave.”  The story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich,