antagenet or Tudor--'tis all the same
to that comely, gentle-looking man. So is it ever with your Abstract
Science! not a jot cares its passionless logic for the woe or weal of a
generation or two. The stream, once emerged from its source, passes on
into the Great Intellectual Sea, smiling over the wretch that it drowns,
or under the keel of the ship which it serves as a slave.

Now, when about to commence the present chapter on the Varieties of Life,
this masterpiece of thoughtful art forced itself on my recollection, and
illustrated what I designed to say. In the surface of every age, it is
often that which but amuses, for the moment, the ordinary children of
pleasant existence, the Edwards and the Clarences (be they kings and
dukes, or simplest of simple subjects), which afterward 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 among us, they occupy a very small portion
of our thoughts, and fill up but desultory interstices in the bitumen and
tufa 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, sate 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