Confession

Brooding, I lay upon the sward, meditating unutterable things,

and as far as ever from any conclusion. Of one thing alone I

was satisfied--that I was unutterably miserable; that my destiny

was written in sable; that I was a man foredoomed to wo! Were

my speculations strange or unnatural! Unnatural indeed! There

is a class of surface-skimming persons, who pronounce all things

unnatural which, to a cool, unprovoked, and perhaps unprovokable

mind, appear unreasonable: as if a vexed nature and exacting

passions were not the most unreasonable yet most natural of all

moral agents. My woes may have been groundless, but it was surely

not unnatural that I felt and entertained them.

Thus, with bitter mood, growing more bitter with every moment of

its unrestrained indulgence, I gloomed in loneliness beside the

banks of that silvery and smooth-flowing river. Certainly the

natural world around me lent no color to my fancies. While all

was dark within, all was bright without. A fiend was tugging at

my heart; while from a little white cottage, a few hundred yards

below, which grew flush with the margin of the stream, there stole

forth the tender, tinkling strains of a guitar, probably touched

by fair fingers of a fair maiden, with some enamored boy, blind and

doting, hovering beside her. I, too, had stood thus and hearkened

thus, and where am I--what am I!

I started to my feet. I found something offensive in the music.

It came linked with a song which I had heard Julia sing a hundred

times; and when I thought of those hours of confidence, and felt

myself where I was, alone--and how lone!--bitterer than ever were

the wayward pangs which were preying upon the tenderest fibres of

my heart.

In the next moment I ceased to be alone. I was met and jostled by

another person as I bounded forward, much too rapidly, in an effort

to bury myself in the deeper shadow of some neighboring trees. The

stranger was nearly overthrown in the collision, which extorted a

hasty exclamation from his lips, not unmingled with a famous oath

or two. In the voice. I recognised that of my friend Kingsley--the

well-known pseudo-Kentucky gentleman, who had acted a part so

important in extricating my wife from her mother's custody. I made

myself known to him in apologizing for my rudeness.

"You here!" said he; "I did not expect to meet you. I have just

been to your house, where I found your wife, and where I intended

to stop a while and wait for you. But Bill Edgerton, in the meanwhile,

popped in, and after that I could hear nothing but pictures and

paintings, Madonnas, Ecce Homos, and the like; till I began to fancy

that I smelt nothing but paint and varnish. So I popped out, with

a pretty blunt excuse, leaving the two amateurs to talk in oil

and water-colors, and settle the principles of art as they please.

Like you, I fancy a real landscape, here, by the water, and under

the green trees, in preference to a thousand of their painted

pictures."