that float in my ebon goblet.  Do you know the charm of melancholy?  Where will you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness?  Does the ocean share your grief?  Does the river listen to your sighs?  The salt wave, that called to you from under last month’s full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid crystal.  It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same, from year to year?  We both change, but we know each other through all changes.  Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours?  And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?’

“I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match in incident.  Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human destiny,—­to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden of life.  I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of.  Ocean was there, all ready, asking no questions, answering none.  What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages!  What strange companions for my pall-bearers!  Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,—­what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral!  No!  No!  Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid of himself.

“Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface?  No, again.  I do not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me.  That must not be.  The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an unwelcome object.

“If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly, pleasantly companionable river.