The Bride of Fort Edward | Page 9

daughters than the fastnesses of this wilderness?
Mait. It would seem so. Yet it is her home. Wild as it looks here, from the top of that hill, where our men came out on the picket just now so suddenly, you will see as fair a picture of cultured life as e'er your eyes looked on. No English horizon frames a lovelier one.
Andre. _Here_? No!
Mait. Between that hill and the fort, there stretches a wide and beautiful plain, covered with orchards and meadows to the wood's edge; and here and there a gentle swell, crowned with trees, some patch of the old wilderness. The infant Hudson winds through it, circling in its deepest bend one little fairy isle, with woods enough for a single bower, and a beauty that fills and characterizes, to its remotest line, the varied landscape it centres; and far away in the east, this same azure mountain-chain we have traced so long, with its changeful light and shade, finishes the scene.
Andre. You should have been a painter, Maitland.
Mait. The first time I beheld it--one summer evening it was, from the woods on the hill's brow;--we were a hunting party, I had lost my way, and ere I knew it there I stood;--its waters lay glittering in the sunset light, and the window-panes of its quiet dwellings were flashing like gold,--the old brown houses looked out through the trees like so many lighted palaces; and even the little hut of logs, nestling on the wood's edge, borrowed beauty from the hour. I was miles from home; but the setting sun could not warn me away from such a paradise, for so it seemed, set in that howling wilderness, and----
Andre. Prithee, go on. I listen.
Mait. I know not how it was, but as I wandered slowly down the shady road, for the first time in years of worldliness, the dream that had haunted my boyhood revived again. Do you know what I mean, Andre?--that dim yearning for lovelier beings and fairer places, whose ideals lie in the heaven-fitted mind, but not in the wilderness it wakes in; that mystery of our nature, that overlooked as it is, and trampled with unmeaning things so soon, hides, after all, the whole secret of this life's dark enigma.
Andre. But see,--our time is well-nigh gone,--this is philosophy--I would have heard a love tale.
Mait. It was then, that near me, suddenly I heard the voice that made this dull, real world, thenceforth a richer place for me than the gorgeous dream-land of childhood was of old.
Andre. Ay, ay--go on.
Mait. Andre, did you ever meet an eye, in which the intelligence of our nature idealized, as it were, the very poetry of human thought seemed to look forth?
Andre. One such.
Mait.--That reflected your whole being; nay, revealed from its mysterious depths, new consciousness, that yet seemed like a faint memory, the traces of some old and pleasant dream?
Andre. Methinks the heavenly revelation itself doth that.
Mait. Such an eye I saw then shining on me. A clump of stately pines grew on the sloping road-side, and, looking into its dark embrasure, I beheld a group of merry children around a spring that gurgled out of the hillside there, and among them, there sat a young girl clad in white, her hat on the bank beside her, tying a wreath of wild flowers. That was all--that was all, Andre.
Andre. Well, she was beautiful, I suppose? Nay, if it was the damsel I met just now I need not ask.
Mait. Beautiful? Ay, they called her so. Beauty I had seen before; but from that hour the sun shone with another light, and the very dust and stones of this dull earth were precious to me. _Beautiful?_ Nay, it was she. I knew her in an instant, the spirit of my being; she whose existence made the lovely whole, of which mine alone had been the worthless and despised fragment. There are a thousand women on the earth the artist might call as lovely,--show me another that I can worship.
Andre. Worship! This is Captain Everard Maitland. If I should shut my eyes now----
Mait. Well, go on; but I tell you, ne'ertheless, there have been times, even in this very spot,--we often wandered here when the day was dying as it is now,--here in her soft, breathing loveliness, she has stood beside me, when I have,--_worshipped?_--nay, feared her, in her holy beauty, as we two should an angel who should come through that glade to us now.
Andre. True it is, something of the Divinity there is in beauty, that, in its intenser forms, repels with all its winningness, until the lowliness of love looks through it. Well--you worshipped her.
Mait. Nay, you have told the rest. I would have worshipped; but one day there came a look from those beautiful eyes, when