I gazed upon the well-
known scene, and I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, "It yet wants
much of sunrise, and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which
they celebrate the first fruits of resurrection. I will walk abroad; old
griefs shall be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still, and the
hills are high and stretch away to heaven; and the forest glades are as
quiet as the churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the fever from my
forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer." And I turned as if to
open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far
different, but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony
with the other. The scene was an Oriental one, and there also it was
Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance
were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a
great city--an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood
from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone
and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it
was--Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at
length: "So, then, I have found you at last." I waited, but she answered
me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet
again how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamplight fell upon
her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me
were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were
now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but
in all other points the same, and not older.
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