They walked out hand in hand through the old court and to the terrace walk, where the grass was glistening with dew, and the birds in the green woods above were singing their delicious choruses under the blushing morning sky. How well all things were remembered! The ancient towers and gables of the hall darkling against the east, the purple shadows on the green slopes, the quaint devices and carvings of the dial, the forest-crowned heights, the fair yellow plain cheerful with crops and corn, the shining river rolling through it toward the pearly hills beyond; all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more. We forget nothing. The memory sleeps but wakens again; I often think how it shall be, when, after the last sleep of death, the _réveillé_ shall arouse us forever, and the past in one flash of self-consciousness rush back, like the soul, revivified.
JOHN GORHAM PALFREY was born at Boston in 1796. His ancestors were prominent in the Revolution, and he came of a brave and godly race.
He graduated from Harvard in 1815, and three years later accepted the pastorate of a Unitarian church in Boston. He became engaged in literary work and leaving the ministry took a professorship at Harvard. He held this position for eight years, from 1831 to 1839.
In 1836 he became editor of the “North American Review” and held this position until 1843.
He became interested in politics and was elected a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, and later, Secretary of State. His best literary work was the “History of New England.”
A GOOD daughter!--there are other ministries of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart’s warm requitals more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent’s affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given.
But a son’s occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection that is following him, perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father’s roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent’s house.