Old and young seem to have an interest in her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily is married. THE CHILD ANGEL A DREAM I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the "Loves of the Angels," and went to bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innumerable conjectures; and, I remember, the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, "what could come of it." I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out--but to some celestial region. It was not the real heavens neither--not the downright Bible heaven--but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor human fancy may have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption. Methought--what wild things dreams are!--I was present--at what would you imagine?--at an angel's gossiping. Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know--but there lay, sure enough, wrapped in its little cloudy swaddling bands--a Child Angel. Sun-threads--filmy beams--ran through the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watching when the new-born should open its yet closed eyes; which, when it did, first one, and then the other--with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained with fear, dims the expanding eye-lids of mortal infants, but as if to explore its path in those its unhereditary palaces--what an inextinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages! Nor wanted there to my seeming--O the inexplicable simpleness of dreams!--bowls of that cheering nectar, --which mortals _caudle_ call below-- Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants,--stricken in years, as it might seem,--so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet, with terrestrial child-rites the young _present_, which earth had made to heaven. Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony as those by which the spheres are tutored; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions--but forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in heaven--a year in dreams is as a day--continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering--still caught by angel hands--for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven.