Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood expanded before me--my sister was moaning in bed--I was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and like the superb Medea standing alone with her children in the nursery at Corinth,[19] smote me senseless to the ground. Again, I was in the chamber with my sister's corpse--again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the glory of summer, the frost of death. Dream formed itself mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulded itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,--the blue heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of "Him that sate thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathered; the priest in his white surplice stood waiting with a book in his hand by the side of an open grave, the sacristan with his shovel; the coffin sank; the _dust to dust_ descended. Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; the 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 downwards 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, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now in Oxford, 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 above my own station, hovered a gleaming host of heavenly beings, surrounding 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. NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS. NO. III. DRYDEN.