`` He sometimes nods his head and threatens to come down , but we are old neighbors , and agree together pretty well , upon the whole . Besides , we have a sure place of refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest . '' Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear 's meat , and by his natural felicity of manner to have placed himself on a footing of kindness with the whole family ; so that they talked as freely together as if he belonged to their mountain-brood . He was of a proud yet gentle spirit , haughty and reserved among the rich and great , but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door and be like a brother or a son at the poor man 's fireside . In the household of the Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling , the pervading intelligence of New England , and a poetry of native growth which they had gathered when they little thought of it from the mountain-peaks and chasms , and at the very threshold of their romantic and dangerous abode . He had travelled far and alone ; his whole life , indeed , had been a solitary path , for , with the lofty caution of his nature , he had kept himself apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions . The family , too , though so kind and hospitable , had that consciousness of unity among themselves and separation from the world at large which in every domestic circle should still keep a holy place where no stranger may intrude . But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple mountaineers , and constrained them to answer him with the same free confidence . And thus it should have been . Is not the kindred of a common fate a closer tie than that of birth ? The secret of the young man 's character was a high and abstracted ambition . He could have borne to live an undistinguished life , but not to be forgotten in the grave . Yearning desire had been transformed to hope , and hope , long cherished , had become like certainty that , obscurely as he journeyed now , a glory was to beam on all his pathway , though not , perhaps , while he was treading it . But when posterity should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present , they would trace the brightness of his footsteps , brightening as meaner glories faded , and confess that a gifted one had passed from his cradle to his tomb with none to recognize him . `` As yet , '' cried the stranger , his cheek glowing and his eye flashing with enthusiasm -- `` as yet I have done nothing . Were I to vanish from the earth to-morrow , none would know so much of me as you -- that a nameless youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco , and opened his heart to you in the evening , and passed through the Notch by sunrise , and was seen no more . Not a soul would ask , ` Who was he ? Whither did the wanderer go ? ' But I can not die till I have achieved my destiny . Then let Death come : I shall have built my monument . ''
There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid abstracted reverie which enabled the family XXXXX understand this young man 's sentiments , though so foreign from their own .
As at from like of than that to upon with