And one among you,--do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he
was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the
deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry
pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.
--Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"?
--To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
us.
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