fragment from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, awoke again the
lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the shadowy
arms that moved downward to meet them. Once again arose the swell of the
anthem, the burst of the hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling
movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling
sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I,
that wallowed in the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now
all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted
into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high in heaven
hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the pillows
of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow
that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the
children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only
to languish in tears.

* * * * *

DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

[In this instance the echoes, that rendered back the infant experience,
might be interpreted by the reader as connected with a _real_ ascent
of the Brocken; which was not the case. It was an ascent through all
its circumstances executed in dreams, which, under advanced stages in
the development of opium, repeat with marvellous accuracy the longest
succession of phenomena derived either from reading or from actual
experience. That softening and spiritualizing haze which belongs at
any rate to the action of dreams, and to the transfigurings worked
upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as those of fifty
years, was in this instance greatly aided to my own feelings by the
alliance with the ancient phantom of the forest mountain in North