I have received thy communication. What! is it so? Has thy pupil disappointed thee? Alas, poor pupil! But-- .... (Here follow comments on those passages in Glyndon’s life already known to the reader, or about to be made so, with earnest adjurations to Mejnour to watch yet over the fate of his scholar.) .... But I cherish the same desire, with a warmer heart. My pupil! how the terrors that shall encompass thine ordeal warn me from the task! Once more I will seek the Son of Light. .... Yes; Adon-Ai, long deaf to my call, at last has descended to my vision, and left behind him the glory of his presence in the shape of Hope. Oh, not impossible, Viola,--not impossible, that we yet may be united, soul with soul! Extract from Letter V.--(Many months after the last.) Mejnour, awake from thine apathy,--rejoice! A new soul will be born to the world,--a new soul that shall call me father. Ah, if they for whom exist all the occupations and resources of human life,--if they can thrill with exquisite emotion at the thought of hailing again their own childhood in the faces of their children; if in that birth they are born once more into the holy Innocence which is the first state of existence; if they can feel that on man devolves almost an angel’s duty, when he has a life to guide from the cradle, and a soul to nurture for the heaven,--what to me must be the rapture to welcome an inheritor of all the gifts which double themselves in being shared! How sweet the power to watch, and to guard,--to instil the knowledge, to avert the evil, and to guide back the river of life in a richer and broader and deeper stream to the paradise from which it flows! And beside that river our souls shall meet, sweet mother. Our child shall supply the sympathy that fails as yet; and what shape shall haunt thee, what terror shall dismay, when thy initiation is beside the cradle of thy child! CHAPTER 4.XI. They thus beguile the way Untill the blustring storme is overblowne, When weening to returne whence they did stray, They cannot finde that path which first was showne, But wander to and fro in waies unknowne. --Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” book i. canto i. st. x. Yes, Viola, thou art another being than when, by the threshold of thy Italian home, thou didst follow thy dim fancies through the Land of Shadow; or when thou didst vainly seek to give voice to an ideal beauty, on the boards where illusion counterfeits earth and heaven for an hour, till the weary sense, awaking, sees but the tinsel and the scene-shifter. Thy spirit reposes in its own happiness. Its wanderings have found a goal. In a moment there often dwells the sense of eternity; for when profoundly happy, we know that it is impossible to die. Whenever the soul FEELS ITSELF, it feels everlasting life.