real, so magical, now--some day will be in the far past; you will sit
right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the
anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely
enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!

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