or the moment, the
ordinary children of pleasant existence, the Edwards and the Clarences
(be they kings and dukes, or simplest of simple subjects), which
afterwards towers out as the great serious epoch of the time. 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 aga