I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted pool just the same as when—­but where are the laughing ripples—­ah!  Miranda—­that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster?

They are with last year’s snow.

Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see again.  Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon?  Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat was no more there, and it was too late?  Perhaps it was that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand in mine and said:  “My life is in your hand.”  And we both believed it true.  Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in that enchanted land—­whether we rode side by side through London streets in a hansom—­“a two-wheeled heaven” we called it—­(for our dream stretches as far back as that prehistoric day—­How old one of us seems to be growing!  You, dear face, can never grow old)—­or sat and laughed at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we drank his red wine to the immortality of our love.  Perhaps we were right, after all.  Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart.  Who knows but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved.  Ah!  Meriel, is it well with you, this summer day?  A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit grasses.  They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and whispering over graves.

Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in dreams.  Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of being.  We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the enfranchised soul.  Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance and death.