Like every young man, I suppose, I loved a fair girl with beautiful blue eyes, and lips so pouting and plump, so ruddy and liquid, that the words seemed sweetened as they melted away from them; but my love was unpropitious, and another was preferred to me.  I have ever been curious to know why.  Vanity always in my own soul made me greatly the superior of the favored one, in all particulars.  But she did not think so, and chose as she liked.  I saw her but once a bride.  I went away, and found, as others do, another and dearer love.  Sitting on my horse by her side, as she held in her beautiful palfrey, upon the summit of a cliff, which rises grandly above, and brows the drab waters of the great Mississippi, she pointed to the river, which resembled a great, white serpent, winding among green fields and noble forests, for twenty miles below.  Her eyes were gray, and large, and lovely; her form was towering, and her mien commanding.  She grew with the scene.  She was born only a mile away, in the midst of a wild forest of walnut and magnolia, amid towering hills, and cherished them and this mighty river in childhood, until she partook of their grandeur and greatness.  I thought she was like the love of my youth, and I loved her, and told her of it.  The sun was waning—­going down to rest, and, like a mighty monarch, was folding himself away to sleep in gorgeous robes of crimson and gold.  In his shaded light, outstretching for fifty miles beyond the river, lay, in sombre silence, the mighty swamp, with its wonderful trees of cypress, clothed in moss of gray, long, and festooning from their summits to the earth below, and waving, like banners, in the passing wind.  The towering magnolia, in all the pride of foliage and flower, shaded us.  The river, in silent and dignified majesty, moved onward far below, and evening breezes bathed, with their delicious touch, our glowing cheeks.  The scene was grand, and my feelings were intense.  In the midst of all this beauty and grandeur, she was the cynosure of eye and heart.  I loved her; and yet, my conscience rebuked me for forgetting my first love, and I asked myself if, in all this wild delirium of soul, there was not some little ingredient of revenge.  No, it was for herself—­all for herself; and, chokingly, I told her of it, when she drooped her head, and, in silence, gave me her hand.  We went away in silence.  There was too much of feeling to admit of speech.  Delicious memory!  Of all our ten children, four only remain.  The willow’s tears bedew her grave, and her sons fill the soldier’s grave, and, wrapped in the gray, sleep well.

Yesterday I met her who first kindled in my bosom affection for woman—­a widowed woman, withered and old.  She smiled:  the lingering trace of what it was, was all that was left.  The little, plump hand was lean and bony, and wrinkles usurped the alabaster brow.  Fifty years had made its mark.  But memory was, by time, untouched.  We parted.  I closed my eyes, and there she was, in her girlhood’s robes and her girlhood’s beauty.  The lip, the cheek, the glorious eye, were all in memory garnered still; and I loved that memory, but not the woman now.  Another was in the niche she first cut in my heart, whose cheek and eye and pouting lip were young and lovely.  Still these memories awoke out of this meeting, and, for hours, I forgot that I was wrinkled, old, and gray.