I WRITE from the pleasant little hamlet of Cherry Valley, under the grateful shade of the locusts and poplars. Scarlet fuschias, pendant from their curved stems, are swaying in the gentle west wind, which is the favorite wind of the flowers. The odorous breath of the geranium and sweet-briar loads the languid air with fragrant blessing. The leaves of the trees overhead just ripple in the wind, like little green waves, and sometimes seem to be whispering together about some of those secrets of nature which you and I can never know, as our ears are too gross—the same secrets which little bugs tell each other in the grass—which the lightnings tell the clouds, as they dart in and out their ragged fringes, like swallows darting in and out the eaves—which the night-winds tell the mountain-tops in the solemn darkness—which the birds sing to each other in umbrageous tree-tops—which the fairies above the earth and gnomes under the earth tell to each other at sunrise and set—the secrets which the Faun knew when he called the animals to him. Some drowsy birds in the trees are piping summer songs to each other. A magic stillness broods in the air in this enchanted valley. Enchanted, because all sounds—the patter of the leaves, the songs of birds, the laughter of children, the lowing of herds, even the drowsy hum of the house-fly—somehow seem to you to be at a distance and, in traveling the distance, come to you fraught with suggestions of music and like veiled spirits of sound, rather than the real substance. The leaves of the corn are flashing like green blades in the sunshine, and the grain-fields on these fertile hill-sides map the country in alternate strips of green and emerald. And overhead, the great concave of the sky, which shuts down upon this valley like a cover, is enameled in blue and white, and scrolled with tufts and whirls of fleecy clouds, past the skill of all cunning architects.

You see, Old Blobbs and Mrs. Blobbs, and Mignon and Celeste, and Aurelia and the baby, and even Boosey and Fitz-Herbert, are all out here together. The circle is complete, save the link that was broken last winter, when the Maiden Aunt went to rejoin him she had mourned so long and for whom she had waited so patiently. But, somehow, we never think of her as gone, although she is sleeping in sound of the surf she loved to hear and in sight of the waves which used to talk to her, in the nights when the storms were all abroad and great ships hurried by in the darkness, like cloudy ghosts of argosies long since rotted in the sands. She seems always to be with us, she was so lovable, so closely bound to us, so gentle in soul, and yet so mysterious in her life—or, rather, in her double life; for I do not think she lived altogether here. Have you never had the feeling come over you, suddenly as a flash leaps from a cloud, that your soul has left the body—that you have shed, as it were, the physical shell which has hemmed you in, and that you are no longer confined within the bounds of matter, but are free as a bird to roam through space? I sometimes think this must be the feeling when death severs the connection between soul and body, and that the effect must be ecstatic to a degree of which we have little comprehension, when every emotion is tempered with this "vesture of decay." I think the Maiden Aunt lived this double life. Sometimes she was intensely human, and her love and care for us all were unbounded. But again there came a strange expression in her eyes and a strange look in her face, as if a chink in the heavens had suddenly opened, and the glamor of its light shone upon her, and through the cloudy rent she were talking with some familiar friend who had gone before. At such times, she did not seem to see us, or even to be aware of our presence. Her eyes had that far-off, penetrating look which you sometimes see in children; and we always left her alone at such times, for she was then very sacred to us.

In the sunset light last evening—and what a sunset it was!—the whole West a sea of rare transparent greenish-blue, flecked with clouds of gold, and purple, and pink, and mother-of-pearl, which floated in it like islands, melting into all fanciful shapes, as the ferns, and palms, and turrets melt in the mirage, the whole landscape bathed in a translucent flood of golden light—in such a sunset, we took one of the Maiden Aunt's letters, which we keep tied up with a lock of her dark and silver-sprinkled hair, and I read therefrom an extract, in which she says:

"I think we live two lives. One of them is the life of this world, a thoroughly material and physical life. It is made up of toils and cares, burdens and pains. It grows out of the lives of others, is closely interwoven with them, and almost depends upon them for its existence. It attaches itself, sometimes, to one other life, as a vine attaches itself to the tree; sometimes it draws sustenance from many. It is, more or less, a superficial life, although it may accomplish great deeds and suffer heroic sufferings. It is of the earth, however, and never soars beyond it. No mystery attaches to it, for it is never called upon to perform mysterious deeds. It is comprised within the limits of threescore-and-ten, and has no past or future. Its mission belongs to the body, and when the body perishes, its mission ends. It has no recollections coming from any time before itself. It makes no prophecies of events in the future.

"The other life we live in ourselves, and it is as mysterious as was the enigma of the Sphinx in the solemn silence of the desert. It takes no thought for the body, for it is the life of the soul. We cannot explain this life to others, for we do not understand it ourselves. It is a starry stranger, imprisoned within the corporeal bars and of mysterious origin and destiny. The fates who weave the fabric of our lives, and Atropos, who stands by with the unerring shears to sever the thread, have no power over it. Have we not lived this life before, and shall we not live it again when the light of this physical life is snuffed out like a farthing rush? If not, how is it that sometimes a sweet strain of music we have never heard before, a solemn voice in the wash of the waves, a perfume of some flower by the wayside, a tone in some human voice, will recall the dim image of something we are confident has never happened in this physical life? If not in this physical life, when and where did it happen? Have we ever lived before this life, and shall we live in it again after this body has decayed? Do we fulfil the mission of this world in the brief span of one life-time? If our life has no end, has it ever had a beginning? Has immortality or eternity a commencement? These are questions which occur to me, especially after those moments when, as I confidently believe, the soul leaves the body, and expands into space and embraces the infinite. I acknowledge that I cannot answer these questions. They are a part of the great mystery of life, which not only envelopes us, but all nature, in its cloud, and reaches, in its influences and its developments, from the grain of sand on the sea-shore up to the Throne of God.

"I think this life, also, is not altogether of itself. Other lives, other fates and other natures are working together in us to add to its mystery. These mysterious influences at work within us compel us to commit acts, which we call impulses, for which we are no more accountable than the hurricane for its destruction. They give us moments when we are filled with a joy almost hysterical, for which we cannot account; and other moments when we are sunk into depths of despair, and all the world seems veiled in black, although we know the sun is shining. At such times, others are acting in us and through us. It may be some old ancestor, who died hundreds of years ago, whose life was so strong in some trait that he sent it down through the years from this one to that one, and it makes its first appearance in you. He or she—he whose life was lost in the passion of some great ecstasy, or she whose life was eclipsed in a cloud of despair which dethroned reason—is speaking with your tongue, and is looking out of your eyes. At such times, your voice assumes a tone not your own; your eyes show a light which is foreign to you. Another has entered and taken possession of you. You cannot estimate the great influence which all those men and women who hang upon your walls and look down upon you from their dim canvasses exercise upon you.

"And this life also manifests itself in sleep, when it takes us into the gorgeous cloudland of dreams, and paints such fantastic images, and unveils a world of which we get glimpses in no other manner—a world of prophecies and strange presentiments, in which, freed from the trammels of the body, the soul roams at will, and sees what has passed and what is to come; in which we suffer tortures keener than those of earth, and enjoy the beatitudes of the blest; in which the poor man is richer than Dives, and Lazarus finds rest from his troubles; and in which all of us get compensation for the loss of all we held precious, in communion with and possession of them, although only for a little moment."

This is the substance of what the Maiden Aunt said in her letter, and we all talked about it in the fast-fading light until the darkness set in and the rain commenced to patter down upon the lilac leaves with a dreamy sort of sound. We gathered about the piano, and sang those four-part Lieder of Felix Mendelssohn's, and then we pledged the memory of the Maiden Aunt in the golden Verzenay and drank the good night willie wacht, and thus we spent a memorial day at Cherry Valley, nestling down in the hollow of the hills like a callow robin in its nest, and we slept the sleep of the just, lulled to rest by the rain-drops playing merry fantasies on the shingles, each of us agreeing that the day was one to be tied up with white ribbon and laid away among the precious keepsakes. And in our dreams came to each the form of a loved one, and our sleep was made beautiful with all pleasant images.

July 17, 1869.