Now, when about to commence the present chapter on the Varieties of Life, this masterpiece of thoughtful art forced itself on my recollection, and illustrated what I designed to say. In the surface of every age, it is often that which but amuses, for the moment, the ordinary children of pleasant existence, the Edwards and the Clarences, (be they kings and dukes, or simplest of simple subjects,) which afterwards towers out as the great serious epoch of the time. When we look back upon human records, how the eye settles upon WRITERS as the main landmarks of the past! We talk of the age of Augustus, of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., of Anne, as the notable eras of the world. Why? Because it is their writers who have made them so. Intervals between one age of authors and another lie unnoticed, as the flats and common lands of uncultured history. And yet, strange to say, when these authors are living amongst us, they occupy a very small portion of our thoughts, and fill up but desultory interstices in the bitumen and tufo wherefrom we build up the Babylon of our lives! So it is, and perhaps so it should be, whether it pleases the conceit of penmen or not. Life is meant to be active; and books, though they give the action to future generations, administer but to the holiday of the present.
And so, with this long preface, I turn suddenly from the Randals and the Egertons, and the Levys, Avenels, and Peschieras--from the plots and passions of practical life, and drop the reader suddenly into one of those obscure retreats wherein Thought weaves, from unnoticed moments, a new link to the chain that unites the ages.
Within a small room, the single window of which opened on a fanciful and fairy-like garden, that has been before described, sate a young man alone. He had been writing: the ink was not dry on his manuscript, but his thoughts had been suddenly interrupted from his work, and his eyes, now lifted from the letter which had occasioned that interruption, sparkled with delight. "He will come," exclaimed the young man; "come here--to the home which I owe to him. I have not been unworthy of his friendship. And she"--his breast heaved, but the joy faded from his face. "Oh strange, strange, that I feel sad at the thought to see her again. See _her_--Ah no!--my own comforting Helen--my own Child-angel! _Her_ I can never see again! The grown woman--that is not my Helen. And yet--and yet, (he resumed, after a pause,) if ever she read the pages, in which thought flowed and trembled under her distant starry light--if ever she see how her image has rested with me, and feel that, while others believe that I invent, I have but remembered--will she not, for a moment, be my own Helen again! Again, in heart and in fancy, stand by my side on the desolate bridge--hand in hand--orphans both, as we stood in the days so sorrowful, yet, as I recall them, so sweet.--Helen in England, it is a dream!"