Produced by David T. Jones, Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net [Illustration: J. Addison] CLARA HARLAND Engraved Expressly for Graham's Magazine GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE. VOL. XXXII. PHILADELPHIA, MAY, 1848. NO. 5. CLARA HARLAND. BY G. G. FOSTER. [SEE ENGRAVING.] CHAPTER I. I am no visionary--no dreamer; and yet my life has been a ceaseless struggle between the realities of everyday care, and a myriad of shadowy phantoms which ever haunt me. In the crowded and thronged city; in the green walks and sunny forests of my native hills; on the broad and boundless prairie, carpeted with velvet flowers; on the blue and dreamy sea--it is the same. I look around, and perceive men and women moving mechanically about me; I even take part in their proceedings, and seem to float along the tardy current upon which they swim, and become a part--an insignificant portion--of the dull and stagnant scene; and yet, often and often, in the busiest moment, when commonplace has its strongest hold upon me, and I feel actually interested in the ordinary pursuits of my fellow-beings, of a sudden, a great curtain seems to fall around, and enclose me on every side; and, instead of the staid and sober visages of the throng, vague and shadowy faces gleam around me, and magnificent eyes, bright and dreamy, glance and flash before me like the figures on a phantasmagoria. In such moments, there comes over me a happy consciousness that _this_ is the reality and all else a dull and painful dream, from which I have escaped as by a great effort. The dreamy faces are familiar to me, and their large, spiritual eyes encounter mine with glances of pleasant recognition. My heart is glad within me that it has found again its friends and old companions, and the mental outline of the common world, faintly drawn by memory, becomes more and more dim and indistinct, like the surface of the earth to one who soars upward in a balloon, and is at length blended with the gray shadows of forgotten thought, which disturb me no more. But anon some rude and jarring discord, from the world below, pierces upward to my ear, and the air becomes suddenly dark and dreary, and dusty, and I fall heavily to earth again.