He dreamed that he was under the high arches of an old cathedral amidst a throng of worshippers.  The light streamed in through vast windows, dark with the purple robes of royal saints, or blazing with yellow glories around the heads of earthly martyrs and heavenly messengers.  The billows of the great organ roared among the clustered columns, as the sea breaks amidst the basaltic pillars which crowd the great cavern of the Hebrides.  The voice of the alternate choirs of singing boys swung back and forward, as the silver censer swung in the hands of the white-robed children.  The sweet cloud of incense rose in soft, fleecy mists, full of penetrating suggestions of the East and its perfumed altars.  The knees of twenty generations had worn the pavement; their feet had hollowed the steps; their shoulders had smoothed the columns.  Dead bishops and abbots lay under the marble of the floor in their crumbled vestments; dead warriors, in their rusted armor, were stretched beneath their sculptured effigies.  And all at once all the buried multitudes who had ever worshipped there came thronging in through the aisles.  They choked every space, they swarmed into all the chapels, they hung in clusters over the parapets of the galleries, they clung to the images in every niche, and still the vast throng kept flowing and flowing in, until the living were lost in the rush of the returning dead who had reclaimed their own.  Then, as his dream became more fantastic, the huge cathedral itself seemed to change into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian vertebrate; its flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind whistling through its thousand-jointed skeleton.

And presently the sound lulled, and softened and softened, until it was as the murmur of a distant swarm of bees.  A procession of monks wound along through an old street, chanting, as they walked, In his dream he glided in among them and bore his part in the burden of their song.  He entered with the long train under a low arch, and presently he was kneeling in a narrow cell before an image of the Blessed Maiden holding the Divine Child in her arms, and his lips seemed to whisper,—­

Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!

He turned to the crucifix, and, prostrating himself before the spare, agonizing shape of the Holy Sufferer, fell into a long passion of tears and broken prayers.  He rose and flung himself, worn-out, upon his hard pallet, and, seeming to slumber, dreamed again within his dream.  Once more in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living choking its aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the cavernous depths of the great organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the singing boys.  A day of great rejoicings,—­for a prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of the mighty skeleton-minster were shaking with anthems, as if there were life of its own within its buttressed ribs.  He looked down at his feet; the folds of the sacred robe were flowing about them:  he put his hand to his head; it was crowned with the holy mitre.  A long sigh, as of perfect content in the consummation of all his earthly hopes, breathed through the dreamer’s lips, and shaped itself, as it escaped, into the blissful murmur—­