The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 10 Page 8

He spoke languidly, and only those few words, like a watch with an inelastic spring, that just ticks a moment or two and stops again.

He seemed a very forlorn old man. In the wantonness of youth, strength, and comfortable condition, — making my prey of people’s individualities, as my custom was, — I tried to identify my mind with the old fellow’s, and take his view of the world, as if looking through a smoke-blackened glass at the sun. It robbed the landscape of all its life. Those pleasantly swelling slopes of our farm, descending towards the wide meadows, through which sluggishly circled the brimful tide of the Charles, bathing the long sedges on its hither and farther shores; the broad, sunny gleam over the winding water; that peculiar picturesqueness of the scene where capes and headlands put