olden reflections.

The strange young face was very quiet, and even the lids rarely moved as
she steadily stared into the shadow. There was no look of thought, nor
any visible effort of concentration in her features; there was rather an
air of patient waiting, of perfect readiness to receive whatever should
come to her out of the depths. So, a beautiful marble face on a tomb
gazes into the shadows of a dim church, and gazes on, and waits, neither
growing nor changing, neither satisfied nor disappointed, but calm and
enduring, as if expecting the resurrection of the dead and the life of
the world to come. But for the rare drooping of the lids, that rested
her sight, the girl would have seemed to be in a trance; she was in a
state of almost perfect contemplation that approached to perfect
happiness, since she was hardly conscious that her strongest wishes were
still unsatisfied.

She had been in the same state before now--last week, last month, last
year, and again and again, as it seemed to her, very long ago; so long,
that the time seemed like ages, and the intervals like centuries, until
it all disappeared altogether in the immeasurable, and the past, the
present, and the future were around her at once, unbroken, always
ending, yet always beginning again. In the midst floated the soul, the
self, the undying individuality, a light that shot out long rays, like a
star, towards the ever present moments in an ever recurring life of
which she had been, and was, and was to be, most keenly conscious.

So far, the truth, perhaps; the truth, guessed by the mystics of all
ages, sometimes hidden in secret writings, sometimes proclaimed to the
light in symbols too plain to be understood, now veiled in the reasoned
propositions of philosophers, now sung in sublime verse by inspired
seers; present, as truth always is, to the few, misunderstood, as all
truths are, by the many.

But beside the truth, and outshining it, came the illusion, clear and
bright, and appealing to the heart with the music of all the changes
that are illusion's life. Sitting very still in the moonlight, Cecilia
saw pictures in the shadow, and herself walking in the mazes of many
dreams; and she watched them, till even her eyelids no longer drooped
from time to time, and her breathing ceased to stir the folds of white
upon her bosom.

Even then, she knew that she herself was not dreaming, but was calling
up dreams which she saw, which could be nothing but v