The family, too,
though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness of unity among
themselves, and separation from the world at large, which, in every
domestic circle, should still keep a holy place where no stranger
may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled the
refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free
confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a
common fate a closer tie than that of birth?
The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted
ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not
to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed
to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty, that,
obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway-
though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity
should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, they
would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner
glories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his
cradle to his tomb with none to recognize him.
"As yet," cried the stranger- his cheek glowing and his eye
flashing with enthusiasm- "as yet, I have done nothing. Were I to
vanish from the earth tomorrow, none would know so much of me as
you: that a nameless youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the
Saco, and opened his heart to you in the evening, and passed through
the Notch by sunrise, and was seen no more.
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