Christmas too is pre-eminently the Feast of the Absent, the Festival of the Far-Away, for the most prosperous ingathering of beloved faces about the Christmas fire can but include a small number of those we would fain have there; and have you ever realized that the absent are ghosts?  That is, they live with us sheerly as spiritual presences, dependent upon our faithful remembrance for their embodiment.  We may not, with our physical eyes, see them once a year; we may not even have so seen them for twenty years; it may be decreed that we shall never see them again; we seldom, perhaps never, write to each other; all we know of each other is that we are alive and love each other across space and time.  Alive—­but how?  Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive—­alive in unforgetting love.

It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our real life is thus literally a ghost-story.  Probably it happens with the majority of us that those who mean most to us, by the necessities of existence, must be far away, met but now and then in brief flashes of meeting that often seem to say so much less than absence; our intercourse is an intercourse of the imagination—­yet how real!  They belong to the unseen in our lives, and have all its power over us.  The intercourse of a mother and a son—­is it not often like that in a world which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the mother must stay in the old nest?  Seldom at Christmas can a mother gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile.  Her big boys are seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own.  But motherhood is in its very nature a ghostly, a spiritual, thing, and the big boys and the old mother are not really divided.  They meet unseen by the Christmas fire, as they meet all the year round in that mysterious ether of the soul, where space and time are not.

Yes, it is strange to think how small a proportion of our lives we spend with those we love; even when we say that we spend all our time with them.  Husband and wife even—­how much of the nearness of the closest of human relations is, and must be, what Rossetti has called “parted presence!” The man must go forth to his labour until the evening.  How few of the twenty-four hours can these two beings who have given their whole lives to each other really give!  Husband and wife even must be content to be ghosts to each other for the greater part of each day.  As Rossetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together: 

Your heart is never away,
But ever with mine, forever,
Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray,
Two souls no power may sever,
Together, O my love, forever!