warlike command or regal or religious sway, he was to rule over the village
children; and now the visionary maid had faded from his fancy, and in her place
he saw the playmate of his childhood.
Would all who cherish such wild wishes but look around them, they would
oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity and happiness, within those
precincts and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy
they who read the riddle without a weary world-search or a lifetime spent in
vain!
Footnotes:
[1]
Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who
died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity
that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the
symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved
friend, and from that day till the hour of his own death he hid his face from men.
[2]
Did Governor Endicott speak less positively, we should suspect a mistake here.
The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric, is not known to have been an
immoral man. We rather doubt his identity with the priest of Merry Mount.
[3]
Essex and Washington streets, Salem.
[4]
The Indian tradition on which this somewhat extravagant tale is founded is both
too wild and too beautiful to be adequately wrought up in prose. Sullivan, in his
history of Maine, written since the Revolution, remarks that even then the
existence of the Great Carbuncle was not entirely discredited.
[5]
This story was suggested by an anecdote of Stuart related in Dunlap's History of
the Arts of Designs—a most entertaining book to the general reader, and a
deeply-interesting one, we should think, to the artist.