Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces
the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last
to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor
irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike;
though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems
to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead--but only sleep;
though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and
we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing
sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our
solitude?--as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our
youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly
stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment,
and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close
upon our heart.

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
on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays--Christmas Day itself--Christmas
Night--and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we
brothers and sisters so dear to one another--never 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 strive to catch a
prisoner--a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar 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 green-robed 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 alike
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 have come with the falling snows, doomed to be
mute on earth--but to be hymning in