Kneeling devoutly, the confessor covered his face with his hands, and prayed even as he had never prayed before. When he lifted his eyes again, lo! the soul had passed away unshriven;--but there was such a smile upon the dead face that the priest marveled, and murmured, with his lips: '_Surely he hath found Her at last_!'--Faintly, with the coming of the dawn, a warm south wind moved the curtains, and bare into the chamber rich scent of magnolia and of jessamine and of those fair blossoms whose odor evoketh beloved memory of long-dead bridal-mornings,--until it seemed that a weird sweet Presence invisible had entered, all silently, and stood there even as a Watcher standeth. And all the East brightened;--and, touched by the yellow magic of the sun, the vapors above the place of his rising formed themselves into a Fountain of Gold. A NAME IN THE PLAZA _June_ 3, 18-- I Sometimes, in that Gloaming that divides deep sleep from the awakening,--when out of the world of wavering memories the first thin fancies begin to soar, like neuroptera, rising on diaphanous wing from a waste of marsh-grasses,--there suddenly comes an old, old longing that stings thought into nervous activity with a sharp pain. The impression in the first moment of wakefulness might be likened to a sense of nostalgia,--but the nostalgia which is rather a world-sickness than a homesickness; there is something in it also resembling the vain regret for what has been left perhaps twenty-years' journey behind us, and has now become a tropical remembrance because we have traveled so far toward the Northern Circle of life. Yet the longing I refer to is more puissant and more subtle than these definable feelings are;--it has almost the force of an impulse; it has no real affinity with the recognizable Past; its visions are archipelagoes which never loomed for us over the heaving of any remembered seas; it is like an unutterable wish to flee away from the Present into the Unknown,--a beautiful unknown, radiant with impossible luminosities of azure and sun-gold! I do not know how to account for this impulse,--unless as an unexplained Something in Man corresponding to the instinct of migration in lower forms of life--especially in those happy winged creatures privileged to follow the perfumed Summer round about the world. And I think it comes to us usually either with the first lukewarm burst of spring, or with the windy glories of autumn. Nevertheless, in the morning it came, out of season, and remained with me, while I watched from the balcony birds and ships alike fleeting tropicward with many-colored wings outspread, and thought of a tame crane at home,--with one wing hopelessly maimed,--that used to cry out bitterly to processions of his wild kindred sailing above the city roofs on their way to other skies.