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, sat 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!"