Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I received a note from my
uncle, from whom I had not heard for a year, or two, informing me that
my father's house, which he had kept rented for me during the first
years of my minority, had been without a tenant for a year, and, as I
had now come of age, I had better go down to D---- and take possession
of it. This letter, touching upon a long train of associations and
recollections, awoke an intense longing in me to revisit the home of my
childhood, and meet those phantom shapes that had woven that spell in
those dreaming years, which I sometimes thought I felt even now. So I
obtained a short leave of absence, and started the next morning in the
coach for D----.
It was what is called a "raw morning," for what reason I know not, for
such days are really elaborated with the most exquisite finish. A soft
gray mist hugged the country in a chilly embrace, while a fine rain
fell as noiselessly as snow, upon soaked ground, drenched trees, and
peevish houses. There is always a sense of wonder about a mist. The
outlines of what we consider our hardest tangibilities are melted away
by it into the airiest dream-sketches, our most positive and glaring
facts are blankly blotted out, and a fresh, clean sheet left for some
new fantasy to be written upon it, as groundless as the rest; our solid
land dissolves in cloud, and cloud assumes the stability of land.
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