My friends, have you read Elia? If so, follow me, walking in the
shadow of his mild presence, while I recount to you my vision of the
Lost Ages. I am neither single nor unblessed with offspring, yet,
like Charles Lamb, I have had my 'dream-children.' Years have flown
over me since I stood a bride at the altar. My eyes are dim and
failing, and my hairs are silver-white. My real children of flesh
and blood have become substantial men and women, carving their own
fortunes, and catering for their own tastes in the matter of wives
and husbands, leaving their old mother, as nature ordereth, to the
stillness and repose fitted for her years. Understand, this is not
meant to imply that the fosterer of their babyhood, the instructor
of their childhood, the guide of their youth, is forsaken or
neglected by those who have sprung up to maturity beneath her eye.
No; I am blessed in my children. Living apart, I yet see them often;
their joys, their cares are mine. Not a Sabbath dawns but it finds
me in the midst of them; not a holiday or a festival of any kind is
noted in the calendar of their lives, but Grandmamma is the first to
be sent for. Still, of necessity, I pass much of my time alone; and
old age is given to reverie quite as much as youth. I can remember a
time--long, long ago--when in the twilight of a summer evening it
was a luxury to sit apart with closed eyes; and, heedless of the
talk that went on in the social circle from which I was withdrawn,
indulge in all sorts of fanciful visions. Then my dream-people were
all full-grown men and women. I do not recollect that I ever thought
about children until I possessed some of my own. Those waking
visions were very sweet--sweeter than the realities of life that
followed; but they were neither half so curious nor half so
wonderful as the dreams that sometimes haunt me now. The imagination
of the old is not less lively than that of the young: it is only
less original. A youthful fancy will create more new images; the
mind of age requires materials to build with: these supplied, the
combinations it is capable of forming are endless. And so were born
my dream-children.
Has it never occurred to you, mothers and fathers, to wonder what
has become of your children's lost ages? Look at your little boy of
five years old. Is he at all, in any respect, the same breathing
creature that you beheld three years back? I think not. Whither,
then, has the sprite vanished? In some hidden fairy nook, in some
mysterious cloud-land he must exist still. Again, in your
slim-formed girl of eight years, you look in vain for the sturdy elf
of five. Gone? No; that cannot be--'a thing of beauty is a joy for
ever.' Close your eyes: you have her there! A breeze-like, sportive,
buoyant thing; a thing of breathing, laughing, unmistakable life;
she is mirrored on your retina as plainly as ever was dancing
sunbeam on a brook. The very trick of her lip--of her eye; the
mischief-smile, the sidelong saucy glance,
'That seems to say,
I know you love me, Mr Grey;'
is it not traced there--all, every line, as clear as when it
brightened the atmosphere about you in the days that are no more? To
be sure it is; and being so, the thing must exist--somewhere.
I never was more fully possessed with this conviction than once
during the winter of last year. It was Christmas-eve. I was sitting
alone, in my old armchair, and had been looking forward to the
fast-coming festival-day with many mingled thoughts--some tender,
but regretful; others hopeful, yet sad; some serious, and even
solemn. As I laid my head back and sat thus with closed eyes,
listening to the church-clock as it struck the hour, I could not but
feel that I was passing--very slowly and gently it is true--towards
a time when the closing of the grave would shut out even that sound
so familiar to my ear; and when other and more precious sounds of
life-human voices, dearer than all else, would cease to have any
meanings for me--and even their very echoes be hushed in the silence
of the one long sleep. Following the train of association, it was
natural that I should recur to the hour when that same church's
bells had chimed my wedding-peal. I seemed to hear their music once
again; and other music sweeter still--the music of young vows that
'kept the word of promise to the ear, and broke it' _not_ 'to the
hope.' Next in succession came the recollection of my children. I
seemed to lose sight of their present identity, and to be carried
away in thought to times and scenes far back in my long-departed
youth, when they were growing up around my knees--beautiful forms of
all ages, from the tender nursling of a single year springing with
outstretched arms into my bosom, to the somewhat rough but ingenuous
boy of ten. As my inner eye traced their different outlines, and
followed them in their graceful growth from year to year, my heart
was seized with a sudden and irresistible longing to hold fast these
beloved but passing images of the brain. What joy, I thought, would
it be to transfix the matchless beauty which had wrought itself thus
into the visions of my old age! to preserve for ever, unchanging,
every varied phase of that material but marvellous structure which
the glorious human soul had animated and informed through all its
progressive stages from the child to the man!
Scarcely was the thought framed when a dull, heavy weight seemed to
press upon my closed eyelids. I now saw more clearly even than
before my children's images in the different stages of their being.
But I saw these, and these alone, as they stood rooted to the
ground, with a stony fixedness in their eyes: every other object
grew dim before me. The living faces and full-grown forms which
until now had mingled with and played their part among my younger
phantoms, altogether disappeared. I had no longer any eyes, any
soul, but for this my new spectre-world. Life, and the things of
life, had lost their interest; and I knew of nothing, conceived of
nothing, but those still, inanimate forms from which the informing
soul had long since passed away.
And now that the longing of my heart was answered, was I satisfied?
For a time I gazed, and drew a deep delight from the gratification
of my vain and impious craving. But at length the still, cold
presence of forms no longer of this earth began to oppress me. I
grew cold and numb beneath their moveless aspect; and constant
gazing upon eyes lighted up by no varying expression, pressed upon
my tired senses with a more than nightmare weight. I felt a sort of
dull stagnation through every limb, which held me bound where I sat,
pulseless and moveless as the phantoms on which I gazed.
As I wrestled with the feeling that oppressed me, striving in vain
to break the bonds of that strange fascination, under the pressure
of which I surely felt that I must perish--a soft voice, proceeding
from whence I knew not, broke upon my ear. 'You have your desire,'
it said gently; 'why, then, struggle thus? Why writhe under the
magic of that joy you have yourself called up? Are they not here
before you, the Lost Ages whose beauty and whose grace you would
perpetuate? What would you more? O mortal!'
'But these forms have no life,' I gasped--'no pulsating, breathing
soul!'
'No,' replied the same still, soft voice; 'these forms belong to the
things of the past. In God's good time they breathed the breath of
life; they had _then_ a being and a purpose on this earth. Their day
has departed--their work is done.'
So saying, the voice grew still: the leaden weight which had pressed
upon my eyelids was lifted off: I awoke.
Filled with reveries of the past--my eyes closed to everything
without--sleep had indeed overtaken me as I sat listening to the old
church-clock. But my vision was not all a vision: my dream-children
came not without their teaching. If they had been called up in
folly, yet in their going did they leave behind a lesson of wisdom.
The morning dawned--the blessed Christmas-morning! With it came my
good and dutiful, my real life--children. When they were all
assembled round me, and when, subdued and thoughtful beneath the
tender and gracious associations of the day, each in turn
ministered, reverently and lovingly, to the old mother's need of
body and of soul, my heart was melted within me. Blessed, indeed,
was I in a lot full to overflowing of all the good gifts which a
wise and merciful Maker could lavish upon his erring and craving
creature. I stood reproved. I felt humbled to think that I should
ever for a moment have indulged one idle or restless longing for the
restoration of that past which had done its appointed work, and out
of which so gracious a present had arisen. One idea impressed me
strongly: I could not but feel that had the craving of my soul been
answered in reality, as my dream had foreshadowed; and had the wise
and beneficent order of nature been disturbed and distorted from its
just relations, how fearful would have been the result! Here, in my
green old age, I stood amongst a new generation, honoured for what I
was, beloved for what I had been. What if, at some mortal wish in
some freak of nature, the form which I now bore were for ever to
remain before the eyes of my children! Were such a thing to befall,
how would their souls ever be lifted upward to the contemplation of
that higher state of being into which it is my hope soon to pass
when the hand which guided me hither shall beckon me hence? At the
thought my heart was chastened. Never since that night have I
indulged in any one wish framed in opposition to nature's laws.
_Now_ I find my dream-children in the present; and to the past I
yield willingly all things which are its own--among the rest, the
Lost Ages.