He dreamed now of one, now of
another beneficent power, of the fire, the air, the earth, or the
water--each of them a gracious woman, who favoured, helped, and
protected him, through dangers and trials innumerable. Such
imaginings may be--nay must be unhealthy for those who will not
attempt the right in the face of loss and pain and shame; but to
those who labour in the direction of their own ideal, dreams will
do no hurt, but foster rather the ideal.
When at length the spinning-wheel ceased with its hum, the silence
was to Cosmo like the silence after a song, and his thoughts
refused to do their humming alone. The same moment he fell--from a
wondrous region where he dwelt with sylphs in a great palace, built
on the tree-tops of a forest ages old; where the buxom air bathed
every limb, and was to his ethereal body as water--sensible as a
liquid; whose every room rocked like the baby's cradle of the
nursery rime, but equilibrium was the merest motion of the will;
where the birds nested in its cellars, and the squirrels ran up and
down its stairs, and the woodpeckers pulled themselves along its
columns and rails by their beaks; where the winds swung the whole
city with a rhythmic roll, and the sway as of tempest waves,
music-ruled to ordered cadences; where, far below, lower than the
cellars, the deer, and the mice, and the dormice, and the foxes,
and all the wild things of the forest, ran in its caves--from this
high city of the sylphs, watched and loved and taught by the most
gracious and graceful and tenderly ethereal and powerful of beings,
he fell supine into Grannie's box-bed, with the departed hum of her
wheel spinning out its last thread of sound in his disappointed
brain.
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