all imaginable orders of architecture-till the shadowy roof, gleaming with golden cupolas, like the cloud-region of the setting sun, set the ility to the grave. "Twould be well for the "The boy is father of the man," and thus libelling the author of their existence. A poor boy indeed must he have been, who submitted to misery when the sun was new in heaven. Did he hate or despise the flowers around his feet, congratulating him on being young like themselves? the stars, young always, though Heaven only knows how many million years old, every night sparkling in happiness which they manifestly wished him to share? Did he indeed in his heart believe that the moon, in spite of her shining midnight face, was made of green cheese? Not only are the foundations dug and laid in boyhood, of all the knowledge and the feelings of our prime, but the ground-flat too built, and often the second story of the entire superstructure, from the windows of which, the soul looking out, beholds nature in her state, and leaps down, unafraid of a fall on the green or white bosom of earth, to join with hymns the front of the procession. The soul afterwards perfects her palace-building up tier after tier of Gaze up on the highest idea-gaze down on the profoundest emotion-and you will know and feel in a moment that it is not a new birth. You become a devout believer in the Pythago rean and Platonic doctrine of metempsychosis and reminiscence, and are awed by the mysterious consciousness of the thought "BEFORE!" Try then to fix its date, and back travels your soul, now groping its way in utter darkness, and now in darkness visible-now launching along lines of steady lustre: such as the moon throws on the broad bosoms of starry lakesnow dazzled by sudden contrast "Blind with excess of light!" But back let it travel, as best or worst it may, through and amidst eras after eras of the wan or radiant past; yet never, except for some sweet instant of delusion, breaking dewdroplike at a touch or a breath, during all that perilous pilgrimage—and perilous must it be, haunted by so many ghosts-never may it reach the shrine it seeks-the fountain from which first flowed that feeling whose origin seems to have been out of the world of timedare we say-in eternity! CHRISTMAS DREAMS. How graciously provided are all the subdivisions of Time, diversifying the dream of human life! And why should moralists mourn over the mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily before our eyes!-leaving image upon image in the waters of memory, that can bear being stirred without being disturbed, and contain steadier and steadier reflections as they seem to repose on an unfathomable depth!-the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the hours, the minutes, the moments, each in itself a different living, and peopled, and haunted world. One Life is a thousand lives, and each individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God. Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded, as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness all their owna yellowness nowhere else so vivid-" the bright consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the lowly grass lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in hand with our goldenhaired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on which she died—the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into the horrid clay, and we were borne deathlike, and wishing to die, out of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! Or at the dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side, and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like a reminiscence of some other state of existence. Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now call transitory, but | athwart the gloom, quick as spectral figures which our BoYHOOD felt as if they would be seen hurrying among the mountains during a ndless-as if they would endure for ever-great storm? Why do some glare and threatarose upon us the glorious dawning of another en-why others fade away with a melancholy new life-YOUTH-with its insupportable sun- smile? Why that one-a Figure all in white, shine, and its agitating storms. Transitory, and with white roses in her hair-come fortoo, we now know, and well deserving the ward through the haze, beautifying into dissame name of dream. But while it lasted, tincter form and face, till her pale beseeching long, various, and agonizing; as, unable to hands almost touch our neck—and then, in a sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the moment, it is as nothing? light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to our heart. Yet life had not then nearly reached its meridian, journeying up the sunbright firmament. How low hung it there exulting, when "it flamed on the forehead of the noontide sky!" Let not the Time be computed by the lights and shadows of the years, but by the innumerable array of visionary thoughts, that kept deploying as if from one eternity into another-now in dark sullen masses, now in long array, brightened as if with spear-points and standards, and moving along through chasm, abyss, and forest, and over the summits of the highest mountains, to the sound of ethereal music, now warlike and tempestuous-now, as "from flutes and soft recorders" accompanying not pæans of victory but hymns of peace. That Life, too, seems, now that it is gone, to have been of a thousand years. Is it gone? Its skirts are yet hovering on the horizon. And is there yet another Life destined for us? That Life which men fear to face-Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream-and where to awake? But now the room is disenchanted-and feebly our lamp is glimmering, about to leave us to the light of the moon and stars. There it is trimmed again-and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within us like a festal strain. And To-Morrow-To-Morrow is Merry Christmas; and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the light sounds of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy walls-and sleep now reigning over all the house save this one room, will be banished far over the sea-and morning will be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies. At dead of night-and it is now dead of night how the heart quakes on a sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same sanctity that filled all the air at the tolling of the kirk-bell, when all the parish was hushed, and the voice of streams heard more distinctly among the banks and braes. Then, all at once, a thunder-storre that many years before, or many years after, drove us, when walking alone over the mountains, into a shieling, will seem to succeed; and we behold the same threatening aspect of the heavens that then quailed our beating hearts, and frowned down our eyelids before the lightning began to flash, and the black rain to deluge all the glens. No need now for any effort of thought. The images rise of themselves-independently of our volition-as if another being, studying the working of our minds, conjured up the phantasmagoria before us who are beholding it with love, wonder, and fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the past; the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts that it had lost, and is made to know that nothing it once experiences ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of immortal life. Why linger on the shadowy wall some of hose phantasmagoria-returning after they have disappeared-and reluctant to pass away into their former oblivion? Why shoot others Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration, painted according to nature-what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a sameness would pervade them all-but only that kind of sameness that pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon and some stars-a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few castellated, clouds ! yet no two nights ever bore more than a family resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that illumine those skies-and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora. Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go”— is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead-but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates, let them he for ever in oblivion! How passing sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our solitude!-as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment, and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close upon our heart. My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the din of crea tures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds on earth. It is the Christmas spirits, neither few nor many, the joy and the Holidays-Christmas Day itself-Christmas might survive; for you must know that unless Night-and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we brothers and sisters so dear to one another-never before had our hearts so yearned towards the authors of our being-our blissful being! There they sit-silent in all that outcry-composed in all that disarray-still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a prisoner-a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy-flight. One old game treads on the heels of another-twenty within the hour-and many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when the moon drops behind the mountain, and small green-robed People of Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For she-the Silver-Tongued-is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike hundreds of years old-and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall, with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below-and, ere another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be mute on earth-but to be hymning in Heaven. Of that House-to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings-with its old ivyed turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its foundations has vanished along with them-and a crowd of other buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne; which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we ourselves-then so linked in love that the band which bound us altogether was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood to be scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought together no more! The old Abbeyit still survives; and there, in that corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was least in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests-there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated-for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep-so seldom to have remembered!-And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we all wept togetherat no long interval-on those pale and placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in their coffins. We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is lled, and genius dies with it. In favoured it be accompanied with imagination, memory "For she can give us back the dead, We Even in the loveliest looks they wore." Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated, one year in this family, another year in that-none present but those whom Charles Lamb the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin from one root-relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth-their lot being cast within that pleasant realm, “the Golden Mean," where the dwellings are connecting links between the hut and the hall— fair edifices resembling manse or mansionhouse, according as the atmosphere expands or contracts their dimensions-in which Competence is next-door neighbour to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of Contentment. Merry Christmases they were indeed--one Lady always presiding, with a figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most venera. ble years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her grandchildren's ears. Nor did the se solemn eyes, bedimmed into a pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly she loved ali those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave; but she sat in sunshine even Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy within the shadow of death; and the "voice not too painfully to touch the heart. For some that called her home" had so long been whis-hearts grew cold and forbidding with selfish pering in her ear, that its accents had become cares—some, warm as ever in their own gen dear to her, and consolatory every word that erous glow, were touched by the chill of Forwas heard in the silence, as from another tune's frowns, ever worst to bear when sudworld. denly succeeding her smiles-some, to rid Whether we were indeed all so witty as we themselves of painful regrets, took refuge in thought ourselves-uncles, aunts, brothers, sis- forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past ters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," -duty banished some abroad, and duty impriit might be presumptuous in us, who were soned others at home-estrangements there considered by ourselves and a few others not were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet the least amusing of the whole set, at this erelong, though causeless, complete-changes distance of time to decide-especially in the were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with innermost nature of those who being friends sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun knew no guile, yet came thereby at last to be -a species of impertinence for which we have friends no more-unrequited love broke some therefore a kindness, even to this day. Had bonds-requited love relaxed others-the death incomparable Thomas Hood had the good for- of one altered the conditions of many-and so tune to have been born a cousin of ours, how-year after year-the Christmas Meeting was with that fine fancy of his would he have shone interrupted-deferred-till finally it ceased at those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! with one accord, unrenewed and unrenewable. Our family, through all its different branches, For when Some Things cease for a time-that has ever been famous for bad voices, but good time turns out to be for ever. ears; and we think we hear ourselves-all those uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, and cousins-singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woful failures were rapturously encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender glance of the eye-a tender pressure of the hand-for cousins are not altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character, possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own; as didst thou, Emily the "Wildcap!"-That sobriquet all forgotten now-for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy showering smiles. Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be-should these imperfect remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts -for his, though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in body is not to be estranged in spirit—and many a dream and many a vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the expression of a doubt-of a fear-than of a belief or a conviction. The soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all intervening darkness-and of those more especially dear it keeps within itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable as they are hallowed. All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of morning-ye Woods, On rolled Suns and Seasons-the old died- Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing the elderly became old-and the young, one that famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! after another, were wafted joyously away on Through this midnight hush-methinks we the wings of hope, like birds almost as soon hear saint and far off sacred musicas they can fly, ungratefully forsaking their "Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!" first essayed their pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed their How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close are all those pale, pillared Churches, Courts to whose shores of silvery sand had grown the and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here trees that furnished timber both for hull and and there a Statue standing in the shade, or mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer Monument sacred to the memory of the pous day, and gathering every breeze that blows, go-the immortal dead. Some great clock is dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees, transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun, and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate. striking from one of many domes-from the majestic Tower of St. Mary Magdalen-and in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy night. Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and meditated and dreamed, those | were indeed years of high and lofty mood which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and ages of old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination spiritualized-a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,our eyes fixed all the while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour "Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary." The City of Palaces disappears—and in the setting sun-light we behold mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow "Nodding their heads, before us go, The merry minstrelsy.” Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher than the Andes in heaven-but sole-sitting at midnight in a small chamber-a melancholy man are we-and there seems a smile of consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust. Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest," have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her records-blanks are there that ought to have been painted with imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation-for who can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the ghastlier gloom of present misery! The phantoms that will not come when we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our anguish we could almost Such hauntings as these are not as if they pray that they might be reburied in oblivion. and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we were visionary-they come and go like forms vainly stretch out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to intrench ourselves by thought of this world against their visitation? The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they being dead! Shall we, the surThey sing a salutation at every door, familiar-vivors, for yet a little while, walk in other ly naming old and young by their Christian companionship out into the day, and let the names; and the eyes that look upward from sunbeams settle on their heads as they used the vales to the hanging huts among the plats to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and and cliffs, see the shadows of the dancers ever show to those in heaven that love for them is and anon crossing the light of the star-like win- now best expressed by remorse and penitence! dow, and the merry music is heard like an Sometimes we have fears about pur memory echo dwelling in the sky. Across those hum--that it is decaying; for, lately, many ordinary ble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week yet interesting occurrences and events, which nights of yore-wandering through our solitary we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, silvan haunts, under the branches of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept venture in, unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers, and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without the shadow of our figure! And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully, though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an unobserved-but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales, woods, groves, single trees, dwellings-all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are, indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself-it will not sink into the earth-it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! that ONE HOUSE!-and well might the sight of ye two together-were it harder-break our heart. But hard at all it is not-therefore it is but crushed. have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful-confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces-tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion hallowed, a sacrifice of tears. For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means what the Germans would call in English-our winter environment. We are imprisoned in a net of our own weaving-an invisible net; yet we can see it when we choose-just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his poll under his plumes-as free in confinement as if let loose into the boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth, the prison unto which we doom 'ourselves no |