s the same. Mine was the
whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like
myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of
years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the
volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness
of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and
finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. If the book was a poem, the
words disappeared, or took the subordinate position of an accompaniment
to the succession of forms and images that rose and vanished with a
soundless rhythm, and a hidden rime.

In one, with a mystical title, which I cannot recall, I read of a
world that is not like ours. The wondrous account, in such a feeble,
fragmentary way as is possible to me, I would willingly impart. Whether
or not it was all a poem, I cannot tell; but, from the impulse I felt,
when I first contemplated writing it, to break into rime, to which
impulse I shall give way if it comes upon me again, I think it must have
been, partly at least, in verse.

CHAPTER XII

"Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold
Blows over the hard earth;
Time is not more confused and cold,
Nor keeps more wintry mirth.

"Yet blow, and roll the world about;
Blow, Time--blow, winter's Wind!
Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out,
And Spring the frost behind."
G. E. M.

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men,
are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the
heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an
external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be
without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of
all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of
the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already
imbodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying behind the
consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped
life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other
connexions with the worlds around us, than those of science and
poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a
self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things
of a man's soul, and, i