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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 for ever-forgotten years of our wonderful being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we 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 own, a 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 along, hand in hand with our golden-haired sister, whom all that looked on loved!—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 she— her coffin-and that velvet pall descended—and 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! And oh! 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 which our boyhood felt as if they would be endless—as if they would endure for ever-arose upon us the glorious dawning of another new life-Youth! with its insupportable sunshine, and its magnificent storms! transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving the name of dream! But while it lasted, long, various, and agonizing, while, unable to sustain "the beauty still more beauteous" of the eyes that first revealed to us the light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to the moon and

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stars, hugged the very heavens to our heart. Yet life had not yet nearly reached its meridian, journeying up the sunbright firmament. How long 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 we fear to face,-age, old age! Four dreams within a dream, and then we may awake in heaven!

At dead of night-and it is now the dead of night-how the heart often quakes on a sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts!

"Thoughts that like phantoms trackless come and go!"

Perhaps the sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same religious 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,-and then, all at once, a thunder-storm 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 hea vens 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, with wonder, or with fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the past; and the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts that it had lost-and is made to know that nothing which it once experiences ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of immortal life.

Why linger on the shadowy wall some of those phantasmagoria-returning after they have disappeared-and reluctant to pass away into their former oblivion? Why shoot others athwart the gloom, quick as spectral figures seen hurrying among mountains during a great storm? Why do some glare and threaten-why others fade away with a melancholy smile-why that one-look! look! a figure all in white, and with white roses in its hair, comes forward through the haze, beautifying into distincter form and face, till its pale, beseeching hands almost touch my bosom-and then, in a moment it is as nothing!

But now the room is disenchanted—and feebly my lamp is glimmering, about to leave me to the light of the moon and stars. There is it trimmed again-and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within me 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 sound of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy walls, and sleep now reigning over all the house-save this one roomwill be banished far over the sea-and Morning will be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.

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 being always, to common eyes, so like another, for what hath any night to be proud of but one moon and some thousand stars-a vault "darkly, deeply, beautifully blue," 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-on ourselves it depends whether they shall be black as Erebus or brighter than any Aurora.

(My father's house! How it is ringing, like a grove in spring, with the din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds in the world! It is the Christmas holidays-Christmas day itself-Christmas nightand joy intensifies love in every bosom. Never before were we brothers and sisters so dear to one anothernever 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 try to catch a prisoner,—a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered cymar 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 the small greenrobed 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 both 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 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 ivied turrets, and orchard-garden, bright alike with fruit and 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 soon to be blotted out from being, and we ourselves, then so linked in love that the band which bound us all together 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 abbey, it 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 starlings' and martins' nests-there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the loved and venerated,—for whom, even now that so many long, long, grief-deadening years have fled, I feel, in this hushed and holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep-so seldom to remember!-and then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief-the floods we all wept together-at no long interval-on those pale and smiling faces, as they lay in their coffins, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold!

"Childish! childish!" methinks I hear some worldwise thinker cry. But has not one of the wisest of spirits said "The child is father of the man?" And if so, ought the man ever to lose sight of any single one of those dear, dim, delightful remembrances, far off and remote, of objects whether alive or dead,-whether instinct with love and intelligence, or but of the insensate sod, that once were to him all his being, so blended was that being then, with all it saw and heard on this musical and lustrous earth, that, as it bounded along in bliss, it was but as the same creation with the grass, the flowers, the streams, the trees, the clouds, the sky, and its days and nights, -all of them bound together by one invisible chain,a green, bright, murmuring, shadowy, floating, sunny and starry world, of which the enraptured creature that enjoyed it was felt to be the very centre,-and the very soul!

Then came a new series of Christmasses, celebrated, one year in this family, another year in that,-none

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