oy of ten. As my inner eye traced their different outlines,
and followed them in their graceful growth from year to year, my heart was
seized with a sudden and irresistible longing to hold fast those beloved
but passing images of the brain. What joy, I thought, would it be, to
transfix the matchless beauty which had wrought itself thus into the
visions of my old age! to preserve, forever, unchanging, every varied
phase of that material but marvelous structure, which the glorious human
soul had animated and informed through all its progressive stages from the
child to the man.

Scarcely was the thought framed when a dull, heavy weight seemed to press
upon my closed eyelids. I now saw more clearly even than before my
children's images in the different stages of their being. But I saw these,
and these alone, as they stood rooted to the ground, with a stony
fixedness in their eyes: every other object grew dim before me. The living
faces and full-grown forms which until now had mingled with and played
their part among my younger phantoms altogether disappeared. I had no
longer any eyes, any soul, but for this my new spectre-world. Life, and
the things of life, had lost their interest; and I knew of nothing,
conceived of nothing, but those still, inanimate forms from which the
informing soul had long since passed away.

And now that the longing of my heart was answered, was I satisfied? For a
time I gazed, and drew a deep delight from the gratification of my vain
and impious craving. But at length the still, cold presence of forms no
longer of this earth began to oppress me. I grew cold and numb beneath
their moveless aspect; and constant gazing upon eyes lighted up by no
varying expression, pressed upon my tired senses with a more than
nightmare weight. I felt a sort of dull stagnation through every limb,
which held me bound where I sat, pulseless and moveless as the phantoms on
which I gazed.

As I wrestled with the feeling that oppressed me, striving in vain to
break the bonds of that strange fascination, under the pressure of which I
surely felt that I must perish--a soft voice, proceeding from whence I knew
not, broke upon my ear. "You have your desire," it said gently; "why,
then, struggle thus? Why writhe under the magic of that joy you have
yourself called up? Are they not here before you, the Lost Ages whose
beauty and whose grace you would perpetuate? What would you more? O
mortal!"

"But these forms have no lif