he air is cool and still, and the hills are high, and
stretch away to heaven; and the churchyard is as verdant as the forest
lawns, and the forest lawns are as quiet as the churchyard; and with
the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead; and then I shall be
unhappy no longer." I turned, as if to open my garden gate, and
immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which yet
the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony. The scene was an
Oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in
the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the
horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city--an image or faint
abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of
Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, shaded by Judean
palms, there sat a woman; and I looked, and it was--Ann! She fixt her
eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length, "So, then, I have
found you at last." I waited; but she answered me not a word. Her face
was the same as when I saw it last; the same, and yet again how
different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light of mighty London
fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann,
that to me were not polluted!), her eyes were streaming with tears.
The tears were now no longer seen. Sometimes she seemed altered; yet
again sometimes _not_ altered; and hardly older. Her looks were
tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed
upon her with some awe. Suddenly her countenance grew dim; and,
turning to the mountains, I perceived vapors rolling between us; in a
moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and in the twinkling
of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in London,
walking again with Ann--just as we had walked when both children,
eighteen years before, along the endless terraces at Oxford Street.

Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character--a
tumultuous dream--commencing with a music such as now I often heard in
sleep--music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations
of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation
Anthem; and like _that_, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement,
of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable
armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and an
ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and
laboring in some dread ext