me. When we
look back upon human records, how the eye settles upon WRITERS as
the main landmarks of the past! We talk of the age of Augustus, of
Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., of Anne, as the notable eras of the world.
Why? Because it is their writers who have made them so. Intervals
between one age of authors and another lie unnoticed, as the flats and
common lands of uncultured history. And yet, strange to say, when these
authors are living amongst us, they occupy a very small portion of our
thoughts, and fill up but desultory interstices in the bitumen and tufo
wherefrom we build up the Babylon of our lives. So it is, and perhaps so
it should be, whether it pleases the conceit of penmen or not. Life is
meant to be active; and books, though they give the action to future
generations, administer but to the holiday of the present.

And so, with this long preface, I turn suddenly from the Randals and
the Egertons, and the Levys, Avenels, and Peschieras, from the plots
and passions of practical life, and drop the reader suddenly into one of
those obscure retreats wherein Thought weaves, from unnoticed moments, a
new link to the chain that unites the ages.

Within a small room, the single window of which opened on a fanciful and
fairy-like garden that has been before described, sat a young man alone.
He had been writing; the ink was not dry on his manuscript, but his
thoughts had been suddenly interrupted from his work, and his eyes, now
lifted from the letter which had occasioned that interruption, sparkled
with delight. "He will come," exclaimed the young man; "come here,--to
the home which I owe to him. I have not been unworthy of his friendship.
And she--" his breast heaved, but the joy faded from his face. "Oh,
strange, strange, that I feel sad at the thought to see her again! See
her--Ah, no! my own comforting Helen, my own Child-angel! Her I can
never see again! The grown woman--that is not my Helen. And yet--and
yet," he resumed after a pause, "if ever she read the pages in which
thought flowed and trembled under her distant starry light, if ever
she see how her image has rested with me, and feel that, while others
believe that I invent, I have but remembered, will she not, for a
moment, be my own Helen again? Again, in heart and in fancy, stand by my
side on the desolate bridge, hand in hand, orphans both, as we stood
in the days so sorrowful, yet, as I recall them, so sweet? Helen in
England--it is a dream!"

He ro