er new life--YOUTH--with its insupportable sunshine, and
its agitating storms. Transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving
the same name of dream. But while it lasted, long, various, and
agonising; as, unable to sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the
light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to
moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to
our heart. Yet life had not then 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 paeans 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 men fear
to face--Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream--and _where_ to awake?

At dead of night--and it is now dead of night--how the heart quakes on a
sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the
sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes
first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same
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. Then, all at once, a thunderstorm,
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 heavens 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,
wonder, a