Excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial"

"And the boy dashed one teardrop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous pleasures of the untrodden forest."
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"Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth his free and exulting step would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topped mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home where Nature had strewn a double wealth in the vale of some transparent stream..."
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​"The dark and gloomy pines looked down upon them, and, as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in fear that men were come to lay the ax to their roots at last?"
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​"The sapling to which he had bound the blood-stained symbol of his vow had increased and strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but with no mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity observable in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches were in luxuriant life, and an excess o vegetation had fringed the trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was withered, sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely eighteen years before. Whose guilt had blasted it?"
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​"From behind the trunk of every tree, and from every hiding place in the thick foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the countenance of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is born of affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light that came down among the leaves was sufficiently dim to create many illusions in her expecting fancy. Several times she seemed indistinctly to see his face gazing out from among the leaves; and once she imagined that he stood beckoning to her at the base of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes on this object, however, it proved to be no more that the trunk of an oak fringed tot the very ground with little branches, one of which thrust out farther that the rest, was shaken by the breeze. Making her way round the foot of the rock, she suddenly found herself close to her husband who had approached in another direction. Leaning upon the butt of his gum, the muzzle of which rested upon the withered leaves, he was apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some object at his feet."