A hope of meeting them--scarce acknowledged as an
intention--spurs you on. The eye rests dreamily and vaguely on the
beauties that appear at every turn: they are beauties that charm you,
and charm you the more by an indefinable association with that fairy
object that floats before you, half unknown, and wholly unclaimed. The
quiet towns with their noonday stillness, the out-lying mansions with
their stately splendor, the bustling cities with their mocking din, and
the long reaches of silent and wooded shore, chime with their several
beauties to your heart, in keeping with the master-key that was touched
long weeks before.
The cool, honest advices of the father drift across your memory in
shadowy forms, as you wander through the streets of the first northern
cities; and all the need for observation, and the incentives to purpose,
which your ambitious designs would once have quickened, fade dismally
when you find that _she_ is not there. All the lax gayety of Saratoga
palls on the appetite; even the magnificent shores of Lake George,
though stirring your spirit to an insensible wonder and love, do not
cheat you into a trance that lingers. In vain the sun blazons every
isle, and lights every shaded cove, and at evening stretches the Black
Mountain in giant slumber on the waters.
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