inspirations. I knew what modern literature owed to it; and to remain ignorant of the source whence had sprung many of the chief refinements of modern thought would be to remain incapable of properly appreciating those refinements themselves.

In my reply I told him he was at liberty to take up his residence in my house at any date that suited him. I named the income I was prepared to pay, and concluded by assuring him he would not find his time severely occupied by his duties.

CHAPTER III.

THE evening of the Wednesday following the day on which I had posted this letter was calm and tropical in the chastened tints of the western heaven and the mild splendour of the moon, whose full orb was slowly climbing over the dark masses of the trees.

I sat at my library window overlooking the back grounds, deep in a fit of abstraction, perceiving without heeding the tardy advent of the large tremulous stars which dropped one by one in sudden (orbs of silver upon the floor of the sky. From the garden the shrill grasshoppers blew their harmonies. Now and then a black moth whizzed by my ear. Afar the bark of a dog deepened the general repose by contrast; and athwart the moon at intervals passed the sombre shadow of a bat.

A depression I could not shake off had fastened upon me. Many causes had conspired to produce it. A few weeks only had passed since my arrival, and already it seemed to me ambition was sinking dejected before the presence of that steep which it had thought to climb.

Those who know what it is to have had their minds torn by the travail of desire without birth-their souls distracted with conceptions which were powerless to shape themselves, with aspirations which were dumb, and could not pronounce the language that would have bred their gratification-will understand the mood that was then on me. The genius of Dante could never have devised keener torments than the desire of ambition without the means.

Add to this that my nature was beginning to rebel against solitude: that instinct was raising its voice against the enforced monotony of my life. Impulse had recoiled, nor had I yet instructed duty to take its place. I feared I had made a mistake in compelling a too sudden transition from a life of pleasure to a calm as of death. I should have sloped the way to my wishes; not abruptly tilted them into the abysm of my scheme.

I took from a side table a lamp of slender bronze and lighted it. I draped the windows to shut out the crystal glory of the orb whose splendour made a daylight in the air, and seating myself at a table, began to read. But labour as I might to keep my attention chained

to the page, the rebellious voice of thought made the effort vain. The eye indeed followed the printed lines; but the mind took no cognisance of them.

Memory was wanton to-night. She waved her hand over the past. The mist rolled away, and the familiar scene lay unfolded.

She renewed the brainless pleasures of my town-life.

She brought before me the calm, grave lineaments of my mother. Then fancy seized the wand and sought to unveil the future. I peered into a cloud at once luminous and dark. Amid the vapour I descried shapes whose outlines I could not determine; I heard sounds whose meaning I could not interpret.

As I gazed the cloud darkened. Red lightnings leaped from its womb; and thunder muttered.

By the electric flashes I witnessed the shapes I had before noticed in attitudes convulsed and tortured. Between the intervals of the sullen thunder-groans I marked the voices I had before heard raised in sobs, and sighs, and lamentations.

Suddenly over the whole there fell a calm. The cloud opened, and in its depth I witnessed the outline of a human face, obscured at first by the gloom, so that I could not discern the lineaments, but brightening presently to a light that shone I knew not whence.

It was a face beautiful and sad. The eyes were dark, the hair yellow, the cheeks colourless as marble shone on by the moon. How exquisitely pathetic was her gaze! My heart leapt up at the sight of her spectral beauty. Then tears dimmed my eyes and I remained watching her with clasped hands. Her lips moved; she spoke; a kind of music fell on my ear. I strained to catch the sounds; but the

accents were inaudible.

"Speak, that I may understand you!" I cried; "you cloud your meaning with melody. Sink your voice-I shall interpret your appeal by the movement of your lips."

The face brightened and grew brighter still, until the features faded in a brilliant light. Then like the lightning-flash it vanished: a deep darkness encompassed me. I was suffocated by the thick cold embrace. In the arms of Nightmare, that dolorous hag, I fought for breath, and thinking that I was dying, I uttered a cry.

I started and stared around me.

So vivid had been the vision, that I could not persuade myself it was unreal, and sought it yet. At the same moment, there was a knock on the door, and Mrs. Williams entered.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought I heard you call as I passed

through the hall."

She withdrew.

I looked at the open book. The leaves were stained with tears. I rose, forcing a laugh.

"My imagination must be keen," I thought, " to conceive such a dream as that. Yet I shall owe that book a grudge for sending me to sleep and filling my slumber with such odd visions. Imagine my shedding tears!"

I approached the mirror. My face was bloodless; nor had my forced merriment driven all the bewilderment out of it.

"This is the fruit of solitude," I mused. "Reason and Imagination are natural enemies; and hence the uses of Society to give the power to Reason requisite to keep the Imagination in subjection. I must pay the penalty of seclusion, and must not complain if I find my mind. growing distempered. Yet what could have evoked that face? Such a countenance I have never seen. It belongs to no experience of mine. I have not read of such a face either; for what author in his senses would give such eyes to a woman born of flesh? Such eyes as those belong to another world-a world of moonlight and dolor: where the issue of love is betrayal-where the fruition of hope is despair. Ay," I thought, pushing the fancy, " in such a world of shadow and moonlight flowers would be colourless and without perfume; the trees would stand white as a woman's brow, the air would wave to the dim shine of spectral shapes who would look on one another with eyes as hopeless and beautiful as hers!"

"This won't do!" I ejaculated, giving myself an angry shake. "What is the hour? Eleven. So late? I must have slept long." I touched the bell; a maid appeared; I ordered her to prepare supper, a meal I was partial to, even when I dined late, and which it was my custom to discuss an hour earlier. But, obedient to my instructions, Mrs. Williams had well disciplined the servants. My meals were never announced, for I had forbidden intrusion when I was in the library.

Mine were no anchorite's repasts. I was what Wordsworth would have called "a man of purple cheer." My means enabled me to gratify a fastidious taste; and of whatever other inelegance I might have been guilty, my table at least illustrated a refined appetite. Had I been born in those not very remote times when to lower the system was esteemed the grand panacea, I should have been the apostle, I know, of our own happier rule of keeping the system up. No bewigged or befrilled doctors would dare have blooded me! The real family physician in my eyes is the cook; and in my opinion one of Dr. Johnson's wisest saws was, "Depend upon it, sir, a man who does not very diligently mind his belly will mind nothing else."

It was half-past eleven when I rose from the table. My dream still troubled me. It recurred again and again like a misgiving. I was sincerely indignant at what I esteemed my imbecility, and had hoped

to put an end to the folly by a judicious application to some old Burgundy. But the generous liquor heated rather than cooled my fancy. Those lovely pleading eyes stood out before me, vivid and tremulous as stars upon the night. I left the parlour, and dismissing the servants to bed, returned to the library, lighted a cigar, and surrendered myself to thought.

I pondered the various opinions expressed by wise men on dreams. In particular I recalled these striking remarks of Coleridge: "Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment."

In abstraction one takes no note of time. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it was close upon one. There was something uncanny in finding myself wide-awake at such an hour. I drew to the window and parted the curtains. The moon had fronted the house, and had thrown the dark shadow of the building far into the grounds. There was not a breath of air to give life to the leaves of the geraniums on the balcony. The room was close. I opened the window and drank in the cool sweetness of the night.

Would a stroll, I wondered, fatigue me and induce sleep? The grounds stretched invitingly, half dark, half-radiant where they were robed in the silver veil of the moonlight. I stepped on to the balcony; a flight of stone steps led to the lawn; I descended them and entered a scene of dew, coolness, and glory.

I walked slowly forwards. The deep and general stillness wrought upon me like a spell. I passed from the shadow into the moonlight, turned, and studied the back aspect of the house. The structure lay wrapped in gloom, save where the lamp in the study shed a yellow lustre upon the half-open window. On either side the building rose trees, sombre, stately and still. Above rode the regent moon.

I strode onward, a moving shape in a world of stirless shadows. Exquisite was this radiant serenity-this scene of tender shadow and silver light, of tints spectral and sweet, cooled by an air aromatic and calm.

I gained the extremity of the grounds. A thick hedge, made solid and heightened by a row of elms, separated (with the orchard) the grounds from the garden of the adjacent house. To my right swept a range of open meadows, with here and there a knot of trees sentinelling the open sweep and swell. A portion of these fields, though not let with, belonged to Elmore Court, and were entered by a gate constructed at the spot I had now reached.

This gate I pushed open and walked leisurely towards a gentle

eminence whose summit promised me a cooler air. This was my first visit to these fields.

As I advanced, I noticed on my left a low dark hedge, in which was another gate. This hedge ran about two hundred yards and then terminated. On gaining the summit of the hillock, I seated myself. Through the trees I saw the silhouette of a small house. Of my own residence I could only perceive the roof, topping the dark cloud of green that seemed to fill the grounds. Away on my left-away to the edge of a sky throbbing with stars, stretched the vague pale country, shadowless, witnout a light of house or gleam of beacon to give reality to its weird blank. And now I heard in the air a voice whose tones had before been shut out by the trees-the murmur of the sea. Though over two miles off, I could catch the beating of its mighty heart, could hear the purring of its breakers, as they creamed beneath the moonlight on the porous beach.

I was presently surprised by hearing the Cliffegate church clock strike two. The long-drawn notes came faintly through the stillness and warned me it was time to return home and get to bed. I rose, and was in the act of advancing, when I was suddenly arrested by perceiving a shadow—a shape-moving with tranquil step by the hedge beyond the second gate.

I gazed curiously, perhaps apprehensively. It went leisurely along, gliding rather than walking. It was draped in white, but over its back was thrown some dark covering, probably a shawl. At the distance I stood from it, I could not discern the lineaments, whether they belonged to man or woman, whether to angel or goblin, whether bloodless as belonging to a ghost, or vital as belonging to some sleepless creature who, like myself, had stolen from his chamber to woo sleep from the slumberous air.

The unexpected apparition unmanned me. The spectral moonshine, the deep night, the faint moan of the sea, the ghost-like shadows of of the still trees, the hazy landscape stretching vague as a vision to the winking stars, were all friendly to superstition. I was agitated by a fear I could not control. With eyes fascinated by the phantasmfor phantasm I was disposed to deem it—I watched its solemn progress watched it traverse the line of hedge, turn, retrace its steps, and finally disappear (so it seemed) through the hedge.

I advanced with a beating heart and rapid step toward the gate. I raised the latch with a trembling hand. But in passing I glanced back, and saw within a few yards of me the form of a woman, motionless as a marble image, her eyes fixed in my direction, her face pale as an evening cloud.

In her black and deep eyes, in her yellow hair, in her countenance of pensive beauty, I witnessed the embodiment of my vision-the cloud face of my dream.