And now that the longing of my heart was answered, was I satisfied?  For a time I gazed, and drew a deep delight from the gratification of my vain and impious craving.  But at length the still, cold presence of forms no longer of this earth began to oppress me.  I grew cold and numb beneath their moveless aspect; and constant gazing upon eyes lighted up by no varying expression, pressed upon my tired senses with a more than nightmare weight.  I felt a sort of dull stagnation through every limb, which held me bound where I sat, pulseless and moveless as the phantoms on which I gazed.

As I wrestled with the feeling that oppressed me, striving in vain to break the bonds of that strange fascination, under the pressure of which I surely felt that I must perish—­a soft voice, proceeding from whence I knew not, broke upon my ear.  ‘You have your desire,’ it said gently; ’why, then, struggle thus?  Why writhe under the magic of that joy you have yourself called up?  Are they not here before you, the Lost Ages whose beauty and whose grace you would perpetuate?  What would you more?  O mortal!’

‘But these forms have no life,’ I gasped—­’no pulsating, breathing soul!’

‘No,’ replied the same still, soft voice; ’these forms belong to the things of the past.  In God’s good time they breathed the breath of life; they had then a being and a purpose on this earth.  Their day has departed—­their work is done.’

So saying, the voice grew still:  the leaden weight which had pressed upon my eyelids was lifted off:  I awoke.

Filled with reveries of the past—­my eyes closed to everything without—­sleep had indeed overtaken me as I sat listening to the old church-clock.  But my vision was not all a vision:  my dream-children came not without their teaching.  If they had been called up in folly, yet in their going did they leave behind a lesson of wisdom.

The morning dawned—­the blessed Christmas-morning!  With it came my good and dutiful, my real life—­children.  When they were all assembled round me, and when, subdued and thoughtful beneath the tender and gracious associations of the day, each in turn ministered, reverently and lovingly, to the old mother’s need of body and of soul, my heart was melted within me.  Blessed, indeed, was I in a lot full to overflowing of all the good gifts which a wise and merciful Maker could lavish upon his erring and craving creature.  I stood reproved.  I felt humbled to think that I should ever for a moment have indulged one idle or restless longing for the restoration of that past which had done its appointed work, and out of which so gracious a present had arisen.  One idea impressed me strongly:  I could not but feel that had the craving of my soul been answered in reality, as my dream had foreshadowed; and had the wise and beneficent order of nature been disturbed and distorted from its just relations, how fearful would have been the result!  Here, in my green old age, I stood amongst a new generation,