CHAPTER XI.
melchester moor—snow—a meeting.
For dreariness, nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of the city of Melchester at a later hour on this same snowy evening—if that may be called a prospect of which the chief constituent was darkness.
It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.
The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river, behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land, partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating heath.
The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on
