Blessed are the shadows of porches and cloisters!  Blessed the walls that shut us out from the dusty, dazzling world, and shed upon us the repose and consolation of our own serene humanity!  We, harassed among the base utilities of life, made weary and sore by the ceaseless struggles of emulation and daily warfare, turn wistfully to the Peripatetic among the shady groves of Athens,—­dream of quiet Saracenic courts, echoing with plashy fountains,—­of hooded monks, pacing away their cloistered lives beneath storied vaults and little patches of sky,—­knowing, while we dream, that out of these came of yore the happiness of the old eurekas and the deep sweetness of ancient knowledge.  And then, away from the city of our toil, the tumult of our ambitions, we gratefully find Vallombrosas of our own, where we walk not alone, but in the pleasant companionship of elevated thoughts, and of old sages and masters, long passed away, but still wise and gentle to those who approach them with faith and simplicity.  Here, like those chimes which wander unheeded over the house-tops of the roaring town, till they drop down blessed dews of Heaven into still, grass-grown courts and deserted by-ways, the great universal human heart beats closer to our own, and our whole being palpitates with almost ethereal sympathies.  Voices of old minstrels, wandering down to us on loving lips through the generations, murmur in our ears the dear burden of human, affection for men and things; and the same tale is poured abundantly into our hearts by all those great masters who, through their Art, have become to us oracles of Beauty and eloquent interpreters of the Love of God.

There are few persons so hardened in the practical life as not to have recognized that in these moments of large and spiritual stillness all the processes of the mind seem to be instinctively attuned to harmonies almost celestial.  Experience and memory present their pictures softened and made gentle by some mysterious power.  The imagination is swayed by the sweetest impulses of humanity; and the whole man is changed.  The mere instincts of affinity are purified and deepened into tenderest affection, and all the external relations of existence

  “come apparelled in more precious habit,
  More moving delicate and full of life,
  Into the eye and prospect of the soul,”

than when they offered themselves to the ordinary waking senses.  This is a wonder and a mystery.  I sometimes believe, thinking on these things, that we have inherited from our father Adam a habit of day-dreaming; that in this exile of coarse and work-day life our heated brows are sometimes fanned with breezes from some half-remembered Araby the Blest, and there instinctively come over us such visions of beatitude that the Paradise we have lost is recalled to us, and we live once more among the dreamy and grateful splendors of Eden.  These moods come upon us so like memories!  But you, graybeard travellers in the Desert of Life, you are not to be deceived by the trickery of the elements; you know the moist mirage; you are not to be beguiled by it from your track; let the unwary dream dreams of bubbling wellsprings and pleasant shade, of palmy oases and tranquil repose; as for you, you must goad your camels and press onward for Jerusalem.