It proceeded only from the wan reflection of a sickly sunbeam
behind me, struggling through the cleft of a dark hail-cloud. It was the
window where in my boyhood I had often peeped at the town-clock through
my little telescope. There was the nursery chamber, and no wonder that
it was regarded with feelings of the deepest interest. Here the first
dawnings of reason broke in upon my soul; the first faint gleams of
intelligence awakened me from a state of infantine unconsciousness. It
was here that I first drank eagerly of the fresh rills of knowledge;
here my imagination, ardent and unrepressed, first plumed its wings for
flight, and I stepped forth over its threshold into a world long since
tried, and found as unsatisfying and unreal as the false glimmer that
now mocked me from the hall of my fathers.
A truce to sentiment!--I came hither, it may be, for a different
purpose. A temporary gush will occasionally spring up from the first
well-head of our affections. However homely and seemingly ill-adapted,
in outward show and character, for giving birth to those feelings
generally designated by the epithet romantic, the place where we first
breathed, where our ideas were first moulded, formed and assimilated, as
it were, to the condition of the surrounding atmosphere (their very
shape and colour determined by the medium in which they first sprung)
the casual recurrence of a scene like this,--forming part and parcel of
our very existence, and incorporated with the very fabric of our
thoughts,--must, in spite of all subsequent impressions, revive those
feelings, however long they may have been dormant, with a force and
vividness which the bare recollection can never excite.
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