ouse of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all
unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment--and it was but for
a moment, and about six o'clock--far away in the country--that appalling
vision met our eyes--till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock,
in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the
journey--or voyage--we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of
knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but
after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!--In the Attics
an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened
into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very
affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverock's in our youth at
the gates of heaven.

At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear
to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer
day's perusal of the "Castle of Indolence." O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy
Thomson!--O that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the
silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we
should have taken--the one would not have turned round the other, but
when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand--and the canoe
would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our
backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the
slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove--the cloud-mountains,
immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.

Ay! Great noise as we have made in the world--our heart's desire is for
silence--its delight is in peace. And is it not so with all men,
turbulent as may have been their lives, who have ever looked into their
own being? The soul longs for peace in itself; therefore, wherever it
discerns it, it rejoices in the image of which it seeks the reality. The
serene human countenance, the wide water sleeping in the moonlight, the
stainless marble-depth of the immeasurable heavens, reflect to it that
tranquillity which it imagines within itself, though it never long dwelt
there, restless as a dove on a dark tree that cannot be happy but in the
sunshine. It loves to look on what it loves, even though it cannot
possess it; and hence its feeling, on contemplating such calm, is not of
simple repose, but desire stirs in it, as if it would fain blend itself
more deeply with the quiet it beholds! The sleep of a desert w