Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.
We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and I have often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must care for their own. That 'awakening,'" I went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the Looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousness of how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with life's first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give. This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion. That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April breathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you can remember the very day," I said. "It was one--" "Yes, I can remember more than that," he interrupted; "I know the words, or some of them; what you just said was the old voice--tang and colour--Poor Robin's voice;" and he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now were his.