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+The Project Gutenberg EBook A Strange Story, by E. B. Lytton, Volume 7.
+#126 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+
+Title: A Strange Story, Volume 7.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7698]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V7 ***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Andrew Heath
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIV.
+
+Lilian's wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in the
+suspension of her reason.  She was habitually calm,--very silent; when she
+spoke it was rarely on earthly things, on things familiar to her past,
+things one could comprehend.  Her thought seemed to have quitted the
+earth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven.  She spoke of wanderings
+with her father as if he were living still; she did not seem to understand
+the meaning we attach to the word "Death."  She would sit for hours
+murmuring to herself: when one sought to catch the words, they seemed in
+converse with invisible spirits.  We found it cruel to disturb her at
+such times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene,--more serenely
+beautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but when we
+called her back to the wrecks of her real life, her eye became troubled,
+restless, anxious, and she would sigh--oh, so heavily!  At times, if we
+did not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her once favourite
+accomplishments,--drawing, music.  And in these her young excellence was
+still apparent, only the drawings were strange and fantastic: they had a
+resemblance to those with which the painter Blake, himself a visionary,
+illustrated the Poems of the "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave,"--faces of
+exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace, coming forth from the bells
+of flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, their
+outlines melting away in fountain or in flower.  So with her music: her
+mother could not recognize the airs she played, for a while so sweetly and
+with so ineffable a pathos, that one could scarcely hear her without
+weeping; and then would come, as if involuntarily, an abrupt discord, and,
+starting, she would cease and look around, disquieted, aghast.
+
+And still she did not recognize Mrs. Ashleigh nor myself as her mother,
+her husband; but she had by degrees learned to distinguish us both from
+others.  To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, but
+not sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longer
+absent than usual, me she missed.  When, after the toils of the day, I
+came to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened.  When
+she sang, she beckoned me to come near to her, and looked at me fixedly,
+with eyes ever tender, often tearful; when she drew she would pause and
+glance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to the
+drawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed in some
+covert allegory messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted her
+smile, and taught myself to say, "Yes, Lilian, I understand!"
+
+And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose, and kissed my
+forehead.  I thought my heart would have broken when I felt that
+spirit-like melancholy kiss.
+
+And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extract
+consolations from its sorrows.  The least wretched of my hours were those
+that I had passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establish
+fragments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpret
+each, between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantly
+vaunted, and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of their
+guide in reason.  It was something even of joy to feel myself needed for
+her guardianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshattered
+instinct of her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stole
+the moment in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, to
+ask, in a trembling whisper, "Lilian, are the angels watching over you?"
+and she would answer "Yes,"  sometimes in words, sometimes with a
+mysterious happy smile--then--then I went to my lonely room, comforted
+and thankful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXV.
+
+The blow that had fallen on my hearth effectually, inevitably killed all
+the slander that might have troubled me in joy.  Before the awe of a great
+calamity the small passions of a mean malignity slink abashed.  I had
+requested Mrs. Ashleigh not to mention the vile letter which Lilian had
+received.  I would not give a triumph to the unknown calumniator, nor
+wring forth her vain remorse, by the pain of acknowledging an indignity to
+my darling's honour; yet, somehow or other, the true cause of Lilian's
+affliction had crept out,--perhaps through the talk of servants,--and the
+public shock was universal.  By one of those instincts of justice that lie
+deep in human hearts, though in ordinary moments overlaid by many a
+worldly layer, all felt (all mothers felt especially) that innocence alone
+could have been so unprepared for reproach.  The explanation I had
+previously given, discredited then, was now accepted without a question.
+Lilian's present state accounted for all that ill nature had before
+misconstrued.  Her good name was restored to its maiden whiteness, by the
+fate that had severed the ties of the bride.  The formal dwellers on the
+Hill vied with the franker, warmer-hearted households of Low Town in the
+nameless attentions by which sympathy and respect are rather delicately
+indicated than noisily proclaimed.  Could Lilian have then recovered and
+been sensible of its repentant homage, how reverently that petty world
+would have thronged around her!  And, ah! could fortune and man's esteem
+have atoned for the blight of hopes that had been planted and cherished on
+ground beyond their reach, ambition and pride might have been well
+contented with the largeness of the exchange that courted their
+acceptance.  Patients on patients crowded on me.  Sympathy with my sorrow
+seemed to create and endear a more trustful belief in my skill.  But the
+profession I had once so enthusiastically loved became to me wearisome,
+insipid, distasteful; the kindness heaped on me gave no comfort,--it but
+brought before me more vividly the conviction that it came too late to
+avail me: it could not restore to me the mind, the love, the life of my
+life, which lay dark and shattered in the brain of my guileless Lilian.
+Secretly I felt a sullen resentment.  I knew that to the crowd the
+resentment was unjust.  The world itself is but an appearance; who can
+blame it if appearances guide its laws?  But to those who had been
+detached from the crowd by the professions of friendship,--those who, when
+the slander was yet new, and might have been awed into silence had they
+stood by my side,--to the pressure of their hands, now, I had no response.
+
+Against Mrs. Poyntz, above all others, I bore a remembrance of unrelaxed,
+unmitigable indignation.  Her schemes for her daughter's marriage had
+triumphed: Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner.  Her mind was, perhaps, softened
+now that the object which had sharpened its worldly faculties was
+accomplished: but in vain, on first hearing of my affliction, had this
+she-Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all her keen comprehension
+of each facility that circumstances gave to her will, availed herself of
+the general compassion to strengthen the popular reaction in favour of
+Lilian's assaulted honour; in vain had she written to me with a gentleness
+of sympathy foreign to her habitual characteristics; in vain besought me
+to call on her; in vain waylaid and accosted me with a humility that
+almost implored forgiveness.  I vouchsafed no reproach, but I could imply
+no pardon.  I put between her and my great sorrow the impenetrable wall of
+my freezing silence.
+
+One word of hers at the time that I had so pathetically besought her aid,
+and the parrot-flock that repeated her very whisper in noisy shrillness
+would have been as loud to defend as it had been to defame; that vile
+letter might never have been written.  Whoever its writer, it surely was
+one of the babblers who took their malice itself from the jest or the nod
+of their female despot; and the writer might have justified herself in
+saying she did but coarsely proclaim what the oracle of worldly opinion,
+and the early friend of Lilian's own mother, had authorized her to
+believe.
+
+By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the
+circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical
+round.  That cordial brotherhood with his patients, which is the true
+physician's happiest gift and humanest duty, forsook my breast.  The
+warning words of Mrs. Poyntz had come true.  A patient that monopolized
+my thought awaited me at my own hearth!  My conscience became troubled; I
+felt that my skill was lessened.  I said to myself, "The physician who, on
+entering the sick-room, feels, while there, something that distracts the
+finest powers of his intellect from the sufferer's case is unfit for his
+calling."  A year had scarcely passed since my fatal wedding day, before I
+had formed a resolution to quit L---- and abandon my profession; and my
+resolution was confirmed, and my goal determined, by a letter I received
+from Julius Faber.
+
+I had written at length to him, not many days after the blow that had
+fallen on me, stating all circumstances as calmly and clearly as my grief
+would allow; for I held his skill at a higher estimate than that of any
+living brother of my art, and I was not without hope in the efficacy of
+his advice.  The letter I now received from him had been begun, and
+continued at some length, before my communication reached him; and this
+earlier portion contained animated and cheerful descriptions of his
+Australian life and home, which contrasted with the sorrowful tone of the
+supplement written in reply to the tidings with which I had wrung his
+friendly and tender heart.  In this, the latter part of his letter, he
+suggested that if time had wrought no material change for the better, it
+might be advisable to try the effect of foreign travel.  Scenes entirely
+new might stimulate observation, and the observation of things external
+withdraw the sense from that brooding over images delusively formed
+within, which characterized the kind of mental alienation I had described.
+"Let any intellect create for itself a visionary world, and all reasonings
+built on it are fallacious: the visionary world vanishes in proportion as
+we can arouse a predominant interest in the actual."
+
+This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a practitioner
+to the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then proceeded to give me
+a hope which I had not dared of myself to form.  He said:--
+
+   "I distinguish the case you so minutely detail from that insanity which
+    is reason lost; here it seems rather to be reason held in suspense.
+    Where there is hereditary predisposition, where there is organic
+    change of structure in the brain,--nay, where there is that kind of
+    insanity which takes the epithet of moral, whereby the whole
+    character becomes so transformed that the prime element of sound
+    understanding, conscience itself, is either erased or warped into the
+    sanction of what in a healthful state it would most disapprove,--it is
+    only charlatans who promise effectual cure.  But here I assume that
+    there is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced, from my own
+    observation, that the nobility of the organs, all fresh as yet in the
+    vigour of youth, would rather submit to death than to the permanent
+    overthrow of their equilibrium in reason; here, where you tell me the
+    character preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and purity,
+    and but over-indulges its own early habit of estranged contemplation;
+    here, without deceiving you in false kindness, I give you the
+    guarantee of my experience when I bid you 'hope!'  I am persuaded
+    that, sooner or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will right
+    itself; because here, in the cause of the malady, we do but deal with
+    the nervous system.  And that, once righted, and the mind once
+    disciplined in those practical duties which conjugal life
+    necessitates, the malady itself will never return; never be
+    transmitted to the children on whom your wife's restoration to health
+    may permit you to count hereafter.  If the course of travel I
+    recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you,
+    let me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I
+    will come to you.  I love you as my son.  I will tend your wife as my
+    daughter."
+
+Foreign travel!  The idea smiled on me.  Julius Faber's companionship,
+sympathy, matchless skill!  The very thought seemed as a raft to a
+drowning mariner.  I now read more attentively the earlier portions of
+his letter.  They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in
+which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere; the
+freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery,
+with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransacked
+quarters of the Old World.  And the strong impulse seized me to transfer
+to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit no longer at
+home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods that shrank from
+all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness for the desolate
+hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if unveiled.  As if to give
+practical excuse and reason for the idea that seized me, Julius Faber
+mentioned, incidentally, that the house and property of a wealthy
+speculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on sale at a price which
+seemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to his judgment, far below
+the value they would soon reach in the hands of a more patient capitalist.
+He wrote at the period of the agricultural panic in the colony which
+preceded the discovery of its earliest gold-fields.  But his geological
+science had convinced him that strata within and around the property now
+for sale were auriferous, and his intelligence enabled him to predict how
+inevitably man would be attracted towards the gold, and how surely the
+gold would fertilize the soil and enrich its owners.  He described the
+house thus to be sold--in case I might know of a purchaser.  It had been
+built at a cost unusual in those early times, and by one who clung to
+English tastes amidst Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settler
+would escape the hardships he had then ordinarily to encounter; it was,
+in short, a home to which a man more luxurious than I might bear a bride
+with wants less simple than those which now sufficed for my darling
+Lilian.
+
+This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the day on
+which I received it, and in the evening I read all, except the supplement,
+aloud to Mrs. Ashleigh in her daughter's presence.  I desired to see if
+Faber's descriptions of the country and its life, which in themselves were
+extremely spirited and striking, would arouse Lilian's interest.  At first
+she did not seem to heed me while I read; but when I came to Faber's
+loving account of little Amy, Lilian turned her eyes towards me, and
+evidently listened with attention.  He wrote how the child had already
+become the most useful person in the simple household.  How watchful the
+quickness of the heart had made the service of the eye; all their
+associations of comfort had grown round her active, noiseless movements;
+it was she who bad contrived to monopolize the management, or supervision,
+of all that added to Home the nameless, interior charm.  Under her eyes
+the rude furniture of the log-house grew inviting with English neatness;
+she took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden gay with flowers
+selected from the wild, and suggested the trellised walk, already covered
+with hardy vine.  She was their confidant in every plan of improvement,
+their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse in every passing
+ailment, her very smile a refreshment in the weariness of daily toil.
+"How all that is best in womanhood," wrote the old man, with the
+enthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful genius,--"how
+all that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into flower from the
+bud of the infant's soul!  The atmosphere seems to suit it,--the
+child-woman in the child-world!"
+
+I heard Lilian sigh; I looked towards her furtively; tears stood in her
+softened eyes; her lip was quivering.  Presently, she began to rub her
+right hand over the left--over the wedding-ring--at first slowly; then
+with quicker movement.
+
+"It is not here," she said impatiently; "it is not here!"
+
+"What is not here?" asked Mrs. Ashleigh, hanging over her.
+
+Lilian leaned back her head on her mother's bosom, and answered faintly,--
+
+"The stain!  Some one said there was a stain on this hand.  I do not see
+it, do you?"
+
+"There is no stain, never was," said I; "the hand is white as your own
+innocence, or the lily from which you take your name."
+
+"Hush! you do not know my name.  I will whisper it.  Soft!--my name is
+Nightshade!  Do you want to know where the lily is now, brother?  I will
+tell you.  There, in that letter.  You call her Amy,--she is the lily;
+take her to your breast, hide her.  Hist! what are those bells?
+Marriage-bells.  Do not let her hear them; for there is a cruel wind that
+whispers the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers, louder and
+louder,
+
+"'Stain on lily
+  Shame on lily,
+  Wither lily.'
+
+"If she hears what the wind whispers to the bells, she will creep away
+into the dark, and then she, too, will turn to Nightshade."
+
+"Lilian, look up, awake!  You have been in a long, long dream: it is
+passing away.  Lilian, my beloved, my blessed Lilian!"
+
+Never till then had I heard from her even so vague an allusion to the
+fatal calumny and its dreadful effect, and while her words now pierced my
+heart, it beat, amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope.
+
+But, alas! the idea that had gleamed upon her had vanished already.  She
+murmured something about Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in black
+garments; became restless, agitated, and unconscious of our presence,
+and finally sank into a heavy sleep.
+
+That night (my room was next to hers with the intervening door open) I
+heard her cry out.  I hastened to her side.  She was still asleep, but
+there was an anxious labouring expression on her young face, and yet not
+an expression wholly of pain--for her lips were parted with a smile,--that
+glad yet troubled smile with which one who has been revolving some subject
+of perplexity or fear greets a sudden thought that seems to solve the
+riddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and as I softly took her hand
+she returned my gentle pressure, and inclining towards me, said, still in
+sleep,--
+
+"Let us go."
+
+"Whither?" I answered, under my breath, so as not to awake her; "is it to
+see the child of whom I read, and the land that is blooming out of the
+earth's childhood?"
+
+"Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves do not change; where the
+night is our day, and the winter our summer.  Let us go! let us go!"
+
+"We will go.  Dream on undisturbed, my bride.  Oh, that the dream could
+tell you that my love has not changed in our sorrow, holier and deeper
+than on the day in which our vows were exchanged!  In you still all my
+hopes fold their wings; where you are, there still I myself have my
+dreamland!"
+
+The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble left the smile; softly
+she drew her hand from my clasp, and rested it for a moment on my bended
+head, as if in blessing.
+
+I rose; stole back to my own room, closing the door, lest the sob I could
+not stifle should mar her sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVI.
+
+I unfolded my new prospects to Mrs. Ashleigh.  She was more easily
+reconciled to them than I could have supposed, judging by her habits,
+which were naturally indolent, and averse to all that disturbed their even
+tenor.  But the great grief which had befallen her had roused up that
+strength of devotion which lies dormant in all hearts that are capable of
+loving another more than self.  With her full consent I wrote to Faber,
+communicating my intentions, instructing him to purchase the property he
+had so commended, and inclosing my banker's order for the amount, on an
+Australian firm.  I now announced my intention to retire from my
+profession; made prompt arrangements with a successor to my practice;
+disposed of my two houses at L----; fixed the day of my departure.
+Vanity was dead within me, or I might have been gratified by the sensation
+which the news of my design created.  My faults became at once forgotten;
+such good qualities as I might possess were exaggerated.  The public
+regret vented and consoled itself in a costly testimonial, to which even
+the poorest of my patients insisted on the privilege to contribute, graced
+with an inscription flattering enough to have served for the epitaph on
+some great man's tomb.  No one who has served an art and striven for a
+name is a stoic to the esteem of others; and sweet indeed would such
+honours have been to me had not publicity itself seemed a wrong to the
+sanctity of that affliction which set Lilian apart from the movement and
+the glories of the world.
+
+The two persons most active in "getting up" this testimonial were,
+nominally, Colonel Poyntz--in truth, his wife--and my old disparager, Mr.
+Vigors!  It is long since my narrative has referred to Mr. Vigors.  It is
+due to him now to state that, in his capacity of magistrate, and in his
+own way, he had been both active and delicate in the inquiries set on foot
+for Lilian during the unhappy time in which she had wandered, spellbound,
+from her home.  He, alone, of all the more influential magnates of the
+town, had upheld her innocence against the gossips that aspersed it; and
+during the last trying year of my residence at L----, he had sought me,
+with frank and manly confessions of his regret for his former prejudice
+against me, and assurances of the respect in which he had held me ever
+since my marriage--marriage but in rite--with Lilian.  He had then, strong
+in his ruling passion, besought me to consult his clairvoyants as to her
+case.  I declined this invitation so as not to affront him,--declined it,
+not as I should once have done, but with no word nor look of incredulous
+disdain.  The fact was, that I had conceived a solemn terror of all
+practices and theories out of the beaten track of sense and science.
+Perhaps in my refusal I did wrong.  I know not.  I was afraid of my own
+imagination.  He continued not less friendly in spite of my refusal.  And,
+such are the vicissitudes in human feeling, I parted from him whom I had
+regarded as my most bigoted foe with a warmer sentiment of kindness than
+for any of those on whom I had counted on friendship.  He had not deserted
+Lilian.  It was not so with Mrs. Poyntz.  I would have paid tenfold the
+value of the testimonial to have erased, from the list of those who
+subscribed to it, her husband's name.
+
+The day before I quitted L----, and some weeks after I had, in fact,
+renounced my practice, I received an urgent entreaty from Miss Brabazon to
+call on her.  She wrote in lines so blurred that I could with difficulty
+decipher them, that she was very ill, given over by Dr. Jones, who had
+been attending her.  She implored my opinion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVII.
+
+On reaching the house, a formal man-servant, with indifferent face,
+transferred me to the guidance of a hired nurse, who led me up the stairs,
+and, before I was well aware of it, into the room in which Dr. Lloyd had
+died.  Widely different, indeed, the aspect of the walls, the character of
+the furniture!  The dingy paperhangings were replaced by airy muslins,
+showing a rose-coloured ground through their fanciful openwork; luxurious
+fauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors, a toilet-table tricked
+out with lace and ribbons; and glittering with an array of silver gewgaws
+and jewelled trinkets,--all transformed the sick chamber of the simple
+man of science to a boudoir of death for the vain coquette.  But the room
+itself, in its high lattice and heavy ceiling, was the same--as the coffin
+itself has the same confines, whether it be rich in velvets and bright
+with blazoning, or rude as a pauper's shell.
+
+And the bed, with its silken coverlet, and its pillows edged with the
+thread-work of Louvain, stood in the same sharp angle as that over which
+had flickered the frowning smoke-reek above the dying, resentful foe.  As
+I approached, a man, who was seated beside the sufferer, turned round his
+face, and gave me a silent kindly nod of recognition.  He was Mr. C----,
+one of the clergy of the town, the one with whom I had the most frequently
+come into contact wherever the physician resigns to the priest the
+language that bids man hope.  Mr. C-----, as a preacher, was renowned for
+his touching eloquence; as a pastor, revered for his benignant piety; as
+friend and neighbour, beloved for a sweetness of nature which seemed to
+regulate all the movements of a mind eminently masculine by the beat of a
+heart tender as the gentlest woman's.
+
+This good man; then whispering something to the sufferer which I did not
+overhear, stole towards me, took me by the hand, and said, also in a
+whisper, "Be merciful as Christians are."  He led me to the bedside, there
+left me, went out, and closed the door.
+
+"Do you think I am really dying, Dr. Fenwick?" said a feeble voice.  "I
+fear Dr. Jones has misunderstood my case.  I wish I had called you in at
+the first, but--but I could not--I could not!  Will you feel my pulse?
+Don't you think you could do me good?"
+
+I had no need to feel the pulse in that skeleton wrist; the aspect of the
+face sufficed to tell me that death was drawing near.
+
+Mechanically, however, I went through the hackneyed formulae of
+professional questions.  This vain ceremony done, as gently and delicately
+as I could, I implied the expediency of concluding, if not yet settled,
+those affairs which relate to this world.
+
+"This duty," I said, "in relieving the mind from care for others to whom
+we owe the forethought of affection, often relieves the body also of many
+a gnawing pain, and sometimes, to the surprise of the most experienced
+physician, prolongs life itself."
+
+"Ah," said the old maid, peevishly, "I understand!  But it is not my will
+that troubles me.  I should not be left to a nurse from a hospital if my
+relations did not know that my annuity dies with me; and I forestalled it
+in furnishing this house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these pretty things will be
+sold to pay those horrid tradesmen!--very hard!--so hard!--just as I got
+things about me in the way I always said I would have them if I could ever
+afford it!  I always said I would have my bedroom hung with muslin, like
+dear Lady L----'s; and the drawing-room in geranium-coloured silk: so
+pretty.  You have not seen it: you would not know the house, Dr. Fenwick.
+And just when all is finished, to be taken away and thrust into the grave.
+It is so cruel!"  And she began to weep.  Her emotion brought on a violent
+paroxysm, which, when she recovered from it, had produced one of those
+startling changes of mind that are sometimes witnessed before
+death,--changes whereby the whole character of a life seems to undergo
+solemn transformation.  The hard will becomes gentle, the proud meek, the
+frivolous earnest.  That awful moment when the things of earth pass away
+like dissolving scenes, leaving death visible on the background by the
+glare that shoots up in the last flicker of life's lamp.
+
+And when she lifted her haggard face from my shoulder, and heard my
+pitying, soothing voice, it was not the grief of a trifler at the loss of
+fondled toys that spoke in the fallen lines of her lip, in the woe of her
+pleading eyes.
+
+"So this is death," she said.  "I feel it hurrying on.  I must speak.  I
+promised Mr. C---- that I would.  Forgive me, can you--can you?  That
+letter--that letter to Lilian Ashleigh, I wrote it!  Oh, do not look at me
+so terribly; I never thought it could do such evil!  And am I not punished
+enough?  I truly believed when I wrote that Miss Ashleigh was deceiving
+you, and once I was silly enough to fancy that you might have liked me.
+But I had another motive; I had been so poor all my life--I had become
+rich unexpectedly; I set my heart on this house--I had always fancied
+it--and I thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh marrying you, and scare
+her and her mother from coming back to L----, I could get the house.  And
+I did get it.  What for?--to die.  I had not been here a week before I got
+the hurt that is killing me--a fall down the stairs,--coming out of this
+very room; the stairs had been polished.  If I had stayed in my old
+lodging, it would not have happened.  Oh, say you forgive me!  Say, say
+it, even if you do not feel you can!  Say it!"  And the miserable woman
+grasped me by the arm as Dr. Lloyd had grasped me.
+
+I shaded my averted face with my hands; my heart heaved with the agony of
+my suppressed passion.  A wrong, however deep, only to myself, I could
+have pardoned without effort; such a wrong to Lilian,--no!  I could not
+say "I forgive."
+
+The dying wretch was perhaps more appalled by my silence than she would
+have been by my reproach.  Her voice grew shrill in her despair.
+
+"You will not pardon me!  I shall die with your curse on my head!  Mercy!
+mercy!  That good man, Mr. C----, assured me you would be merciful.  Have
+you never wronged another?  Has the Evil One never tempted you?"
+
+Then I spoke in broken accents: "Me!  Oh, had it been I whom you
+defamed--but a young creature so harmless, so unoffending, and for so
+miserable a motive!"
+
+"But I tell you, I swear to you, I never dreamed I could cause such
+sorrow; and that young man, that Margrave, put it into my head!"
+
+"Margrave!  He had left L---- long before that letter was written!"
+
+"But he came back for a day just before I wrote: it was the very day.  I
+met him in the lane yonder.  He asked after you,--after Miss Ashleigh;
+and when he spoke he laughed, and I said, 'Miss Ashleigh had been ill, and
+was gone away;' and he laughed again.  And I thought be knew more than he
+would tell me, so I asked him if he supposed Mrs. Ashleigh would come
+back, and said how much I should like to take this house if she did not;
+and again he laughed, and said, 'Birds never stay in the nest after the
+young ones are hurt,' and went away singing.  When I got home, his laugh
+and his song haunted me.  I thought I saw him still in my room, prompting
+me to write, and I sat down and wrote.  Oh, pardon, pardon me!  I have
+been a foolish poor creature, but never meant to do such harm.  The Evil
+One tempted me!  There he is, near me now!  I see him yonder! there, at
+the doorway.  He comes to claim me!  As you hope for mercy yourself, free
+me from him!  Forgive me!"
+
+I made an effort over myself.  In naming Margrave as her tempter, the
+woman had suggested an excuse, echoed from that innermost cell of my mind,
+which I recoiled from gazing into, for there I should behold his image.
+Inexpiable though the injury she had wrought against me and mine, still
+the woman was human--fellow-creature-like myself;--but he?
+
+I took the pale hand that still pressed my arm, and said, with firm
+voice,--
+
+"Be comforted.  In the name of Lilian, my wife, I forgive you for her and
+for me as freely and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against whose
+precepts the best of us daily sin, to forgive--we children of wrath--to
+forgive one another!"
+
+"Heaven bless you!--oh, bless you!" she murmured, sinking back upon her
+pillow.
+
+"Ah!" thought I, "what if the pardon I grant for a wrong far deeper than I
+inflicted on him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber, should indeed
+be received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips of the dying annul
+the dark curse that the dead has left on my path through the Valley of the
+Shadow!"
+
+I left my patient sleeping quietly,--the sleep that precedes the last.  As
+I went down the stairs into the hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing at the
+threshold, speaking to the man-servant and the nurse.
+
+I would have passed her with a formal bow, but she stopped me.
+
+"I came to inquire after poor Miss Brabazon," said she.
+
+"You can tell me more than the servants can: is there no hope?"
+
+"Let the nurse go up and watch beside her.  She may pass away in the sleep
+into which she has fallen."
+
+"Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you--nay, but for a few minutes.  I hear
+that you leave L---- to-morrow.  It is scarcely among the chances of life
+that we should meet again."  While thus saying, she drew me along the lawn
+down the path that led towards her own home.  "I wish," said she,
+earnestly, "that you could part with a kindlier feeling towards me; but I
+can scarcely expect it.  Could I put myself in your place, and be moved by
+your feelings, I know that I should be implacable; but I--"
+
+"But you, madam, are The World! and the World governs itself, and
+dictates to others, by laws which seem harsh to those who ask from its
+favour the services which the World cannot tender, for the World admits
+favourites, but ignores friends.  You did but act to me as the World ever
+acts to those who mistake its favour for its friendship."
+
+"It is true," said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candour; and we continued to
+walk on silently.  At length she said abruptly, "But do you not rashly
+deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow?  When the heart
+suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind?
+Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed; you
+desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from the
+fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself, and
+dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the life of
+a herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild!  No, you will repent, for you
+are untrue to your mind!"
+
+"I am sick of the word 'mind'!" said I, bitterly.  And therewith I
+relapsed into musing.
+
+The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl Book
+of Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice of
+thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward sense;
+for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in our human
+organization which the colleges that record them rather guess at than
+solve.  But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by the
+hand of a fool.  Here, there were no mystic enchantments.  Motives the
+most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallow
+as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of poets, had
+sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the uses for
+which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as great as heaven
+ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as mine against the
+shaft that bad lodged in my heart.  While I had, indeed, been preparing my
+reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, as
+those by which tales round the winter fireside scare the credulous child,
+a contrivance--so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day passes but what some
+hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel--had wrought a calamity more dread
+than aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-Land unpierced by
+Philosophy could trace to the prompting of malignant witchcraft.  So, ever
+this truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon--through the
+uniform records of what wonder accredits and science rejects as the
+supernatural--lo! the dread machinery whose wheels roll through Hades!
+What need such awful engines for such mean results?  The first blockhead
+we meet in our walk to our grocer's can tell us more than the ghost tells
+us; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts us more than the demon.  How
+true an interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth!  The Fiend comes to
+Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge; Heaven and Hell stake their cause in
+the Mortal's temptation.  And what does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal?
+Turn wine into fire, turn love into crime.  We need no Mephistopheles to
+accomplish these marvels every day!
+
+Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman; and
+when she next spoke, I looked up, and saw that we were at the Monks' Well,
+where I had first seen Lilian gazing into heaven!
+
+Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on my arm; and, turning
+abruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing by her side
+in the scene where a new sense of being had first disclosed to my sight
+the hues with which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into purple and
+gold the gray of the common air.  Thus, when romance has ended in sorrow,
+and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and positive forms
+of life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our mournful
+remembrance of the glories they replace.  And the Woman of the World,
+finding how little I was induced to respond to her when she had talked of
+myself, began to speak, in her habitual clear, ringing accents, of her own
+social schemes and devices,--
+
+"I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fenwick; for though, during the
+last year or so, all actual intercourse between us has ceased, yet my
+interest in you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I sat
+alone,--having lost my main object of ambition in settling my daughter,
+and having no longer any one in the house with whom I could talk of the
+future, or for whom I could form a project.  It is so wearisome to count
+the changes which pass within us, that we take interest in the changes
+that pass without.  Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no longer
+my Jane."
+
+"I cannot linger with you on this spot," said I, impatiently turning back
+into the path; she followed, treading over fallen leaves.  And unheeding
+my interruption, she thus continued her hard talk,--
+
+"But I am not sick of my mind, as you seem to be of yours; I am only
+somewhat tired of the little cage in which, since it has been alone, it
+ruffles its plumes against the flimsy wires that confine it from wider
+space.  I shall take up my home for a time with the new-married couple:
+they want me.  Ashleigh Sumner has come into parliament.  He means to
+attend regularly and work hard, but he does not like Jane to go into the
+world by herself, and he wishes her to go into the world, because he wants
+a wife to display his wealth for the improvement of his position.  In
+Ashleigh Sumner's house I shall have ample scope for my energies, such as
+they are.  I have a curiosity to see the few that perch on the wheels of
+the State and say, 'It is we who move the wheels!'  It will amuse me to
+learn if I can maintain in a capital the authority I have won in a country
+town; if not, I can but return to my small principality.  Wherever I live
+I must sway, not serve.  If I succeed--as I ought, for in Jane's beauty
+and Ashleigh's fortune I have materials for the woof of ambition, wanting
+which here, I fall asleep over my knitting--if I succeed, there will be
+enough to occupy the rest of my life.  Ashleigh Sumner must be a power;
+the power will be represented and enjoyed by my child, and created and
+maintained by me!  Allen Fenwick, do as I do.  Be world with the world,
+and it will only be in moments of spleen and chagrin that you will sigh to
+think that the heart may be void when the mind is full.  Confess you envy
+me while you listen."
+
+"Not so; all that to you seems so great appears to me so small!  Nature
+alone is always grand, in her terrors as well as her charms.  The World
+for you, Nature for me.  Farewell!"
+
+"Nature!" said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately.  "Poor Allen Fenwick!  Nature
+indeed,--intellectual suicide!  Nay, shake hands, then, if for the last
+time."
+
+So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-gate and the stone stairs
+separated my blighted fairy-land from the common thoroughfare.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII.
+
+That night as I was employed in collecting the books and manuscripts which
+I proposed to take with me, including my long-suspended physiological
+work, and such standard authorities as I might want to consult or refer to
+in the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered to inform me, in
+answer to the inquiries I had sent him to make, that Miss Brabazon had
+peacefully breathed her last an hour before.  Well! my pardon had perhaps
+soothed her last moments; but how unavailing her death-bed repentance to
+undo the wrong she had done!
+
+I turned from that thought, and, glancing at the work into which I had
+thrown all my learning, methodized into system with all my art, I recalled
+the pity which Mrs. Poyntz had expressed for my meditated waste of mind.
+The tone of superiority which this incarnation of common-sense accompanied
+by uncommon will assumed over all that was too deep or too high for her
+comprehension had sometimes amused me; thinking over it now, it piqued.  I
+said to myself, "After all, I shall bear with me such solace as
+intellectual occupation can afford.  I shall have leisure to complete this
+labour; and a record that I have lived and thought may outlast all the
+honours which worldly ambition may bestow upon Ashleigh Summer!"  And, as
+I so murmured, my hand, mechanically selecting the books I needed, fell on
+the Bible that Julius Faber had given to me.
+
+It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our Church places amongst
+the Apocrypha, and is generally considered by scholars to have been
+written in the first or second century of the Christian era,[1]--but in
+which the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to which we can
+trace back his desire "to comprehend the ways of the Most High," are
+invested with a grandeur of thought and sublimity of word to which I know
+of no parallel in writers we call profane.
+
+My eye fell on this passage in the lofty argument between the Angel whose
+name was Uriel, and the Prophet, perplexed by his own cravings for
+knowledge:--
+
+   "He [the Angel] answered me, and said, I went into a forest, into a
+    plain, and the trees took counsel,
+
+   "And said, Come, let us go and make war against the sea, that it may
+    depart away before us, and that we may make us more woods.
+
+   "The floods of the sea also in like manner took counsel, and said,
+    Come, let us go up and subdue the woods of the plain, that there also
+    we may make us another country.
+
+   "The thought of the wood was in vain, for the fire came and consumed it.
+
+   "The thought of the floods of the sea came likewise to nought, for the
+    sand stood up and stopped them.
+
+   "If thou went judge now betwixt these two, whom wouldst thou begin to
+    justify; or whom wouldst thou condemn?
+
+   "I answered and said, Verily it is a foolish thought that they both
+    have devised; for the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea also
+    hath his place to bear his floods.
+
+   "Then answered he me, and said, Thou halt given a right judgment; but
+    why judgest thou not thyself also?
+
+   "For like as the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea to his
+    floods, even so they that dwell upon the earth may understand nothing
+    but that which is upon the earth; and He that dwelleth above the
+    heavens may only understand the things that are above the height of
+    the heavens."
+
+I paused at those words, and, closing the Sacred Volume, fell into deep,
+unquiet thought.
+
+[1] Such is the supposition of Jahn.  Dr. Lee, however, is of opinion that
+the author was contemporary, and, indeed, identical, with the author of
+the Book of Enoch.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIX.
+
+I had hoped that the voyage would produce some beneficial effect upon
+Lilian; but no effect, good or bad, was perceptible, except, perhaps, a
+deeper silence, a gentler calm.  She loved to sit on the deck when the
+nights were fair, and the stars mirrored on the deep.  And once thus, as I
+stood beside her, bending over the rail of the vessel, and gazing on the
+long wake of light which the moon made amidst the darkness of an ocean to
+which no shore could be seen, I said to myself, "Where is my track of
+light through the measureless future?  Would that I could believe as I did
+when a child!  Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from my knowledge
+should lead me away from the comfort which the peasant who mourns finds in
+faith!  Why should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me,--me, no fond
+child of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools the severest?  Yet what
+marvel--the strangest my senses have witnessed or feigned in the fraud
+they have palmed on me--is greater than that by which a simple affection,
+that all men profess to have known, has changed the courses of life
+prearranged by my hopes and confirmed by my judgment?  How calmly before I
+knew love I have anatomized its mechanism, as the tyro who dissects the
+web-work of tissues and nerves in the dead!  Lo! it lives, lives in me;
+and, in living, escapes from my scalpel, and mocks all my knowledge.  Can
+love be reduced to the realm of the senses?  No; what nun is more barred
+by her grate from the realm of the senses than my bride by her solemn
+affliction?  Is love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious minds?  No,
+my beloved one sits by my side, and I guess not her thoughts, and my mind
+is to her a sealed fountain.  Yet I love her more--oh, ineffably
+more!--for the doom which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns to
+love--in the form, in the mind!  How can I now, in my vain physiology, say
+what is love, what is not?  Is it love which must tell me that man has a
+soul, and that in soul will be found the solution of problems never to be
+solved in body or mind alone?"
+
+My self-questionings halted here as Lilian's hand touched my shoulder.
+She had risen from her seat, and had come to me.
+
+"Are not the stars very far from earth?" she said.
+
+"Very far."
+
+"Are they seen for the first time to-night?"
+
+"They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the fathers of all human
+races!"
+"
+"Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see, wave
+flows on wave before we can count it!"
+
+"Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and answer my thought?"
+
+Her reply was incoherent and meaningless.  If a gleam of intelligence had
+mysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone.  But drawing her
+nearer towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of light,
+dividing the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the sloping
+horizon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXX.
+
+The voyage is over.  At the seaport at which we landed I found a letter
+from Faber.  My instructions had reached him in time to effect the
+purchase on which his descriptions had fixed my desire.  The stock, the
+implements of husbandry, the furniture of the house, were included in the
+purchase.  All was prepared for my arrival, and I hastened from the then
+miserable village, which may some day rise into one of the mightiest
+capitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness.
+
+It was the burst of the Australian spring, which commences in our autumn
+month of October.  The air was loaded with the perfume of the acacias.
+Amidst the glades of the open forest land, or climbing the craggy banks
+of winding silvery creeks,[1] creepers and flowers of dazzling hue
+contrasted the olive-green of the surrounding foliage.  The exhilarating
+effect of the climate in that season heightens the charm of the strange
+scenery.  In the brilliancy of the sky, in the lightness of the
+atmosphere, the sense of life is wondrously quickened.  With the very
+breath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air, he feels as if
+inhaling hope.
+
+We have reached our home, we are settled in it; the early unfamiliar
+impressions are worn away.  We have learned to dispense with much that we
+at first missed, and are reconciled to much that at first disappointed or
+displeased.
+
+The house is built but of logs; the late proprietor had commenced, upon a
+rising ground, a mile distant, a more imposing edifice of stone, but it is
+not half finished.
+
+This log-house is commodious, and much has been done, within and without,
+to conceal or adorn its primitive rudeness.  It is of irregular,
+picturesque form, with verandas round three sides of it, to which the
+grape-vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to the
+gable roof.  There is a large garden in front, in which many English
+fruit-trees have been set, and grow fast amongst the plants of the tropics
+and the orange-trees of Southern Europe.  Beyond stretch undulous
+pastures, studded not only with sheep, but with herds of cattle, which my
+speculative predecessor had bred from parents of famous stock, and
+imported from England at mighty cost; but as yet the herds had been of
+little profit, and they range their luxuriant expanse of pasture with as
+little heed.  To the left soar up, in long range, the many-coloured hills;
+to the right meanders a creek, belted by feathery trees; and on its
+opposite bank a forest opens, through frequent breaks, into park-like
+glades and alleys.  The territory, of which I so suddenly find myself the
+lord, is vast, even for a colonial capitalist.
+
+It had been originally purchased as "a special survey," comprising twenty
+thousand acres, with the privilege of pasture over forty thousand more.
+In very little of this land, though it includes some of the most fertile
+districts in the known world, has cultivation been even commenced.  At the
+time I entered into possession, even sheep were barely profitable; labour
+was scarce and costly.  Regarded as a speculation, I could not wonder that
+my predecessor fled in fear from his domain.  Had I invested the bulk of
+my capital in this lordly purchase, I should have deemed myself a ruined
+man; but a villa near London, with a hundred acres, would have cost me as
+much to buy, and thrice as much to keep up.  I could afford the investment
+I had made.  I found a Scotch bailiff already on the estate, and I was
+contented to escape from rural occupations, to which I brought no
+experience, by making it worth his while to serve me with zeal.  Two
+domestics of my own, and two who had been for many years with Mrs.
+Ashleigh, had accompanied us: they remained faithful and seemed contented.
+So the clockwork of our mere household arrangements went on much the same
+as in our native home.  Lilian was not subjected to the ordinary
+privations and discomforts that await the wife even of the wealthy
+emigrant.  Alas! would she have heeded them if she had been?
+
+The change of scene wrought a decided change for the better in her health
+and spirits, but not such as implied a dawn of reviving reason.  But her
+countenance was now more rarely overcast.  Its usual aspect was glad with
+a soft mysterious smile.  She would murmur snatches of songs, that were
+partly borrowed from English poets, and partly glided away into what
+seemed spontaneous additions of her own,--wanting intelligible meaning,
+but never melody nor rhyme.  Strange, that memory and imitation--the two
+earliest parents of all inventive knowledge--should still be so active,
+and judgment--the after faculty, that combines the rest into purpose and
+method-be annulled!
+
+Julius Faber I see continually, though his residence is a few miles
+distant.  He is sanguine as to Lilian's ultimate recovery; and, to my
+amazement and to my envy, he has contrived, by some art which I cannot
+attain, to establish between her and himself intelligible communion.  She
+comprehends his questions, when mine, though the simplest, seem to her in
+unknown language; and he construes into sense her words, that to me are
+meaningless riddles.
+
+"I was right," he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the garden
+beside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay--listless yet
+fretful--under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks and
+fields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from which
+the arch of the horizon seemed to spring,--"I was right," said the great
+physician; "this is reason suspended, not reason lost.  Your wife will
+recover; but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and I will tell you the conclusion
+to which I have come."
+
+I rose, the old man leaned on me, and we went down the valley along the
+craggy ridges of the winding creek.  The woodland on the opposite bank was
+vocal with the chirp and croak and chatter of Australian birds,--all
+mirthful, all songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which some early
+irreverent emigrant degraded to the name of magpie, but whose note is
+sweeter than the nightingale's, and trills through the lucent air with a
+distinct ecstatic melody of joy that dominates all the discords, so
+ravishing the sense, that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds the
+scream of the parrots.
+
+[1] Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious water
+Courses and tributary streams.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI.
+
+"You may remember," said Julius Faber, "Sir Humphry Davy's eloquent
+description of the effect produced on him by the inhalation of nitrous
+oxide.  He states that he began to lose the perception of external things;
+trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through his mind, and were
+connected with words in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly
+novel.  'I existed,' he said, 'in a world of newly-connected and
+newly-modified ideas.' When he recovered, he exclaimed: 'Nothing exists
+but thoughts; the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures,
+and pains!'
+
+"Now observe, that thus a cultivator of positive science, endowed with one
+of the healthiest of human brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas,
+abstracted from all external life,--enters into a new world, which
+consists of images he himself creates and animates so vividly that, on
+waking, he resolves the universe itself into thoughts."
+
+"Well," said I, "but what inference do you draw from that voluntary
+experiment, applicable to the malady of which you bid me hope the cure?"
+
+"Simply this: that the effect produced on a healthful brain by the nitrous
+oxide may be produced also by moral causes operating on the blood, or on
+the nerves.  There is a degree of mental excitement in which ideas are
+more vivid than sensations, and then the world of external things gives
+way to the world within the brain.[1]  But this, though a suspension of
+that reason which comprehends accuracy of judgment, is no more a permanent
+aberration of reason than were Sir Humphry Davy's visionary ecstasies
+under the influence of the gas.  The difference between the two states of
+suspension is that of time, and it is but an affair of time with our
+beloved patient.  Yet prepare yourself.  I fear that the mind will not
+recover without some critical malady of the body!"
+
+"Critical! but not dangerous?--say not dangerous!  I can endure the
+pause of her reason; I could not endure the void in the universe if her
+life were to fade from the earth."
+
+"Poor friend! would not you yourself rather lose life than reason?"
+
+"I--yes!  But we men are taught to set cheap value on our own lives; we do
+not estimate at the same rate the lives of those we love.  Did we do so,
+Humanity would lose its virtues."
+
+"What, then!  Love teaches that there is something of nobler value than
+mere mind?  Yet surely it cannot be the mere body?  What is it, if not
+that continuance of being which your philosophy declines to
+acknowledge,--namely, soul?  If you fear so painfully that your Lilian
+should die, is it not that you fear to lose her forever?"
+
+"Oh, cease, cease!" I cried impatiently.  "I cannot now argue on
+metaphysics.  What is it that you anticipate of harm to her life?  Her
+health has been stronger ever since her affliction.  She never seems to
+know ailment now.  Do you not perceive that her cheek has a more hardy
+bloom, her frame a more rounded symmetry, than when you saw her in
+England?"
+
+"Unquestionably.  Her physical forces have been silently recruiting
+themselves in the dreams which half lull, half amuse her imagination.
+Imagination! that faculty, the most glorious which is bestowed on the
+human mind, because it is the faculty which enables thought to create, is
+of all others the most exhausting to life when unduly stimulated and
+consciously reasoning on its own creations.  I think it probable that had
+this sorrow not befallen you, you would have known a sorrow yet
+graver,--you would have long survived your Lilian.  As it is now, when she
+recovers, her whole organization, physical and mental, will have undergone
+a beneficent change.  But, I repeat my prediction,--some severe malady of
+the body will precede the restoration of the mind; and it is my hope that
+the present suspense or aberration of the more wearing powers of the mind
+may fit the body to endure and surmount the physical crisis.  I remember a
+case, within my own professional experience, in many respects similar to
+this, but in other respects it was less hopeful.  I was consulted by a
+young student of a very delicate physical frame, of great mental energies,
+and consumed by an intense ambition.  He was reading for university
+honours.  He would not listen to me when I entreated him to rest his mind.
+I thought that he was certain to obtain the distinction for which he
+toiled, and equally certain to die a few months after obtaining it.  He
+falsified both my prognostics.  He so overworked himself that, on the day
+of examination, his nerves were agitated, his memory failed him; he
+passed, not without a certain credit, but fell far short of the rank
+amongst his fellow competitors to which he aspired.  Here, then, the
+irritated mind acted on the disappointed heart, and raised a new train of
+emotions.  He was first visited by spectral illusions; then he sank into a
+state in which the external world seemed quite blotted out.  He heeded
+nothing that was said to him; seemed to see nothing that was placed before
+his eyes,--in a word, sensations became dormant, ideas preconceived
+usurped their place, and those ideas gave him pleasure.  He believed that
+his genius was recognized, and lived amongst its supposed creations
+enjoying an imaginary fame.  So it went on for two years, during which
+suspense of his reason, his frail form became robust and vigorous.  At the
+end of that time he was seized with a fever, which would have swept him in
+three days to the grave had it occurred when I was first called in to
+attend him.  He conquered the fever, and, in recovering, acquired the full
+possession of the intellectual faculties so long suspended.  When I last
+saw him, many years afterwards, he was in perfect health, and the object
+of his young ambition was realized; the body had supported the mind,--he
+had achieved distinction.  Now what had so, for a time, laid this strong
+intellect into visionary sleep?  The most agonizing of human emotions in a
+noble spirit,--shame!  What has so stricken down your Lilian?  You have
+told me the story: shame!--the shame of a nature pre-eminently pure.  But
+observe that, in his case as in hers, the shock inflicted does not produce
+a succession of painful illusions: on the contrary, in both, the illusions
+are generally pleasing.  Had the illusions been painful, the body would
+have suffered, the patient died.  Why did a painful shock produce pleasing
+illusions?  Because, no matter how a shock on the nerves may originate, if
+it affects the reason, it does but make more vivid than impressions from
+actual external objects the ideas previously most cherished.  Such ideas
+in the young student were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas in the young
+maiden are ideas of angel comforters and heavenly Edens.  You miss her
+mind on the earth, and, while we speak, it is in paradise."
+
+"Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the speculations of great
+writers, with whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those writers, nor
+in your encouraging words, do I find a solution for much that has no
+precedents in my experience,--much, indeed, that has analogies in my
+reading, but analogies which I have hitherto despised as old wives'
+fables.  I have bared to your searching eye the weird mysteries of my
+life.  How do you account for facts which you cannot resolve into
+illusions,--for the influence which that strange being, Margrave,
+exercised over Lilian's mind or fancy, so that for a time her love for me
+was as dormant as is her reason now; so that he could draw her--her whose
+nature you admit to be singularly pure and modest--from her mother's home?
+The magic wand; the trance into which that wand threw Margrave himself;
+the apparition which it conjured up in my own quiet chamber when my mind
+was without a care and my health without a flaw,--how account for all
+this: as you endeavoured, and perhaps successfully, to account for all my
+impressions of the Vision in the Museum, of the luminous, haunting shadow
+in its earlier apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart tormented,
+and, it might be, even the physical forces of this strong frame
+disordered?"
+
+"Allen," said the old pathologist, "here we approach a ground which few
+physicians have dared to examine.  Honour to those who, like our bold
+contemporary, Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in seeking
+to extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by experiment,
+from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to found a
+philosophy, and to which philosophy tracks the origin of magic."
+
+"What! do I understand you?  Is it you, Julius Faber, who attach faith to
+the wonders attributed to animal magnetism and electro-biology, or
+subscribe to the doctrines which their practitioners teach?"
+
+"I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen with my own eyes the
+wonders recorded, upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to permit
+me peremptorily to deny what I have not witnessed.[2]  But wherever I look
+through the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I find a
+concurrence in certain beliefs which seem to countenance the theory that
+there is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power over forms of
+animated organization, with which they establish some unaccountable
+affinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over inanimate
+matter.  You are familiar with the theory of Descartes, 'that those
+particles of the blood which penetrate to the brain do not only serve to
+nourish and sustain its substance, but to produce there a certain very
+subtle Aura, or rather a flame very vivid and pure, that obtains the name
+of the Animal Spirits;'[3] and at the close of his great fragment upon
+Man, he asserts that 'this flame is of no other nature than all the fires
+which are in inanimate bodies.'[4]  This notion does but forestall the
+more recent doctrine that electricity is more or less in all, or nearly
+all, known matter.  Now, whether in the electric fluid or some other fluid
+akin to it of which we know still less, thus equally pervading all matter,
+there may be a certain magnetic property more active, more operative upon
+sympathy in some human constitutions than in others, and which can account
+for the mysterious power I have spoken of, is a query I might suggest, but
+not an opinion I would hazard.  For an opinion I must have that basis of
+experience or authority which I do not need when I submit a query to the
+experience and authority of others.  Still, the supposition conveyed in
+the query is so far worthy of notice, that the ecstatic temperament (in
+which phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is peculiarly
+sensitive to electric atmospheric influences.  This is a fact which most
+medical observers will have remarked in the range of their practice.
+Accordingly, I was prepared to find Mr Hare Townshend, in his interesting
+work,[5] state that he himself was of 'the electric temperament,' sparks
+flying from his hair when combed in the dark, etc.  That accomplished
+writer, whose veracity no one would impugn, affirms that between this
+electrical endowment and whatever mesmeric properties he might possess,
+there is a remarkable relationship and parallelism.  Whatever state of the
+atmosphere tends to accumulate and insulate electricity in the body,
+promotes equally' (says Mr. Townshend) 'the power and facility with which
+I influence others mesmerically.' What Mr. Townshend thus observes in
+himself, American physicians and professors of chemistry depose to have
+observed in those modern magicians, the mediums of (so-called) 'spirit
+manifestation.' They state that all such mediums are of the electric
+temperament, thus everywhere found allied with the ecstatic, and their
+power varies in proportion as the state of the atmosphere serves to
+depress or augment the electricity stored in themselves.  Here, then, in
+the midst of vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as altogether
+the tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted as
+supernatural portents-here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may,
+perhaps, find a starting point, from which inductive experiment may
+arrive, soon or late, at a rational theory.  But however the power of
+which we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament)
+may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I am
+persuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is not
+wholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft.  It
+is well said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjects
+with the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, 'that if
+magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign would
+never have endured so long; but that its art took its origin in singular
+phenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested in
+the conditions of sleep.  These phenomena, the principle of which was at
+first unknown, served to root faith in magic, and often abused even
+enlightened minds.  The enchanters and magicians arrived, by divers
+practices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a determined order
+of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of inducing fits of
+hypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so affected imagined
+that they saw, heard, touched, supernatural beings, conversed with them,
+proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which magic proclaimed
+itself to possess the secret.  The public, the enchanters, and the
+enchanted were equally dupes.'[6]  Accepting this explanation,
+unintelligible to no physician of a practice so lengthened as mine has
+been, I draw from it the corollary, that as these phenomena are exhibited
+only by certain special affections, to which only certain special
+constitutions are susceptible, so not in any superior faculties of
+intellect, or of spiritual endowment, but in peculiar physical
+temperaments, often strangely disordered, the power of the sorcerer in
+affecting the imagination of others is to be sought.  In the native tribes
+of Australasia the elders are instructed in the arts of this so-called
+sorcery, but only in a very few constitutions does instruction avail to
+produce effects in which the savages recognize the powers of a sorcerer:
+it is so with the Obi of the negroes.  The fascination of Obi is an
+unquestionable fact, but the Obi man cannot be trained by formal lessons;
+he is born a fascinator, as a poet is born a poet.  It is so with the
+Laplanders, of whom Tornoeus reports that of those instructed in the
+magical art 'only a few are capable of it.'  'Some,' he says, 'are
+naturally magicians.' And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the
+mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a
+magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though
+developed by practice and art.  Now, that this gift and its practice
+should principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade
+into insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be
+accounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination.  In the
+cruder states of social life not only is imagination more frequently
+predominant over all other faculties, but it has not the healthful vents
+which the intellectual competition of cities and civilization affords.
+The man who in a savage tribe, or in the dark feudal ages, would be a
+magician, is in our century a poet, an orator, a daring speculator, an
+inventive philosopher.  In other words, his imagination is drawn to
+pursuits congenial to those amongst whom it works.  It is the tendency of
+all intellect to follow the directions of the public opinion amidst which
+it is trained.  Where a magician is held in reverence or awe, there will
+be more practitioners of magic than where a magician is despised as an
+impostor or shut up as a lunatic.  In Scandinavia, before the introduction
+of Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful powers of the Vala,
+or witch, who was then held in reverence and honour.  Christianity was
+introduced, and the early Church denounced the Vala as the instrument of
+Satan, and from that moment down dropped the majestic prophetess into a
+miserable and execrated old hag!"
+
+"The ideas you broach," said I, musingly, "have at moments crossed me,
+though I have shrunk from reducing them to a theory which is but one of
+pure hypothesis.  But this magic, after all, then, you would place in the
+imagination of the operator, acting on the imagination of those whom it
+affects?  Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for here
+we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology."
+
+"And possibly," said Faber, "we may find hints to guide us to useful
+examination, if not to complete solution of problems that, once
+demonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value,--hints, I say, in
+two writers of widely opposite genius, Van Helmont and Bacon.  Van
+Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many
+extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the
+disciplined reasoners of our day.  He supposed that the faculty which he
+calls Fantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination,--is invested with
+the power of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses, each
+idea clothed in a form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming an
+operative entity.  This notion is so far favoured by modern physiologists,
+that Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was extirpated; yet the
+extirpation was followed by the appearance of luminous figures before the
+orbit.  And again, a woman, stone-blind, complained of 'luminous images,
+with pale colours, before her eyes.'  Abercrombie mentions the case 'of a
+lady quite blind, her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who never
+walked out without seeing a little old woman in a red cloak, who seemed to
+walk before her.'[7]  Your favourite authority, the illustrious Miller,
+who was himself in the habit of 'seeing different images in the field of
+vision when he lay quietly down to sleep, asserts that these images are
+not merely presented to the fancy, but that even the images of dreams are
+really seen,' and that 'any one may satisfy himself of this by accustoming
+himself regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream,--the images
+seen in the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed to
+disappear gradually.'  He confirms this statement not only by the result
+of his own experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza, and the
+yet higher authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral appearance as
+the internal action of the sense of vision.[8]  And this opinion is
+favoured by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads him to suggest
+'that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as
+external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of
+vision as if they had been formed by the agency of light.'  Be this as it
+may, one fact remains,--that images can be seen even by the blind as
+distinctly and vividly as you and I now see the stream below our feet and
+the opossums at play upon yonder boughs.  Let us come next to some
+remarkable suggestions of Lord Bacon.  In his Natural History, treating of
+the force of the imagination, and the help it receives 'by one man working
+by another,' he cites an instance he had witnessed of a kind of juggler,
+who could tell a person what card he thought of.  He mentioned this 'to a
+pretended learned man, curious in such things,' and this sage said to him,
+'It is not the knowledge of the man's thought, for that is proper to God,
+but the enforcing of a thought upon him, and binding his imagination by a
+stronger, so that he could think of no other card.'  You see this sage
+anticipated our modern electro-biologists!  And the learned man then
+shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, 'Did the juggler tell the card to the man
+himself who had thought of it, or bid another tell it?'  'He bade another
+tell it,' answered Lord Bacon.  'I thought so,' returned his learned
+acquaintance, 'for the juggler himself could not have put on so strong an
+imagination; but by telling the card to the other, who believed the
+juggler was some strange man who could do strange things, that other man
+caught a strong imagination.'[9]  The whole story is worth reading,
+because Lord Bacon evidently thinks it conveys a guess worth examining.
+And Lord Bacon, were he now living, would be the man to solve the
+mysteries that branch out of mesmerism or (so-called) spiritual
+manifestation, for he would not pretend to despise their phenomena for
+fear of hurting his reputation for good sense.  Bacon then goes on to
+state that there are three ways to fortify the imagination.  'First,
+authority derived from belief in an art and in the man who exercises it;
+secondly, means to quicken and corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means
+to repeat and refresh it.'  For the second and the third he refers to the
+practices of magic, and proceeds afterwards to state on what things
+imagination has most force,--'upon things that have the lightest and
+easiest motions, and, therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and,
+in them, on such affections as move lightest,--in love, in fear, in
+irresolution.  And,' adds Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spirit
+from that which dictates to the sages of our time the philosophy of
+rejecting without trial that which belongs to the Marvellous,--'and
+whatsoever is of this kind, should be thoroughly inquired into.' And this
+great founder or renovator of the sober inductive system of investigation
+even so far leaves it a matter of speculative inquiry, whether imagination
+may not be so powerful that it can actually operate upon a plant, that he
+says: 'This likewise should be made upon plants, and that diligently; as
+if you should tell a man that such a tree would die this year, and will
+him, at these and these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth.'  I
+presume that no philosopher has followed such recommendations: had some
+great philosopher done so, possibly we should by this time know all the
+secrets of what is popularly called witchcraft."
+
+And as Faber here paused, there came a strange laugh from the
+fantastic she-oak-tree overhanging the stream,--a wild, impish laugh.
+
+"Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing-bird of the
+Australian bush," said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious
+alarm.
+
+We walked on for some minutes in musing silence, and the rude log-hut in
+which my wise companion had his home came in view,--the flocks grazing on
+undulous pastures, the lone drinking at a watercourse fringed by the
+slender gum-trees, and a few fields, laboriously won from the luxuriant
+grassland, rippling with the wave of corn.
+
+I halted, and said, "Rest here for a few moments, till I gather up the
+conclusions to which your speculative reasoning seems to invite me."
+
+We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxuriant creepers with
+vermilion buds.
+
+"From the guesses," said I, "which you have drawn from the erudition of
+others and your own ingenious and reflective inductions, I collect this
+solution of the mysteries, by which the experience I gain from my senses
+confounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment.  To the rational
+conjectures by which, when we first conversed on the marvels that
+perplexed me, you ascribe to my imagination, predisposed by mental
+excitement, physical fatigue or derangement, and a concurrence of singular
+events tending to strengthen such predisposition, the phantasmal
+impressions produced on my senses,--to these conjectures you now add a new
+one, more startling and less admitted by sober physiologists.  You
+conceive it possible that persons endowed with a rare and peculiar
+temperament can so operate on imagination, and, through the imagination,
+on the senses of others, as to exceed even the powers ascribed to the
+practitioners of mesmerism' and electro-biology, and give a certain
+foundation of truth to the old tales of magic and witchcraft.  You imply
+that Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence he
+unquestionably exercised over Lilian, and over, perhaps, less innocent
+agents, charmed or impelled by his will.  And not discarding, as I own I
+should have been originally induced to do, the queries or suggestions
+adventured by Bacon in his discursive speculations on Nature, to wit,
+'that there be many things, some of them inanimate, that operate upon the
+spirits of men by secret sympathy and antipathy,' and to which Bacon gave
+the quaint name of 'imaginants,' so even that wand, of which I have
+described to you the magic-like effects, may have had properties
+communicated to it by which it performs the work of the magician, as
+mesmerists pretend that some substance mesmerized by them can act on the
+patient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer himself.  Do I state your
+suppositions correctly?"
+
+"Yes; always remembering that they are only suppositions, and volunteered
+with the utmost diffidence.  But since, thus seated in the early
+wilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence of childlike guess, may it
+not be possible, apart from the doubtful question whether a man can
+communicate to an inanimate material substance a power to act upon the
+mind or imagination of another man--may it not, I say, be possible that
+such a substance may contain in itself such a virtue or property potent
+over certain constitutions, though not over all.  For instance, it is in
+my experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some nervous
+temperaments, though wholly without effect on others.  I remember a young
+girl, who having taken up a hazel-stick freshly cut, could not relax her
+hold of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force, was
+irresistibly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and, after
+holding it a few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance, in which she
+beheld phantasmal visions.  Mentioning this curious case, which I supposed
+unique, to a learned brother of our profession, he told me that he had
+known other instances of the effect of the hazel upon nervous temperaments
+in persons of both sexes.  Possibly it was some such peculiar property in
+the hazel that made it the wood selected for the old divining-rod.  Again,
+we know that the bay-tree, or laurel, was dedicated to the oracular
+Pythian Apollo.  Now wherever, in the old world, we find that the learning
+of the priests enabled them to exhibit exceptional phenomena, which
+imposed upon popular credulity, there was a something or other which is
+worth a philosopher's while to explore; and, accordingly, I always
+suspected that there was in the laurel some property favourable to
+ecstatic vision in highly impressionable temperaments.  My suspicion, a few
+years ago, was justified by the experience of a German physician,
+who had under his care a cataleptic or ecstatic patient, and who
+assured me that he found nothing in this patient so stimulated the state
+of 'sleep-waking,' or so disposed that state to indulge in the
+hallucinations of prevision, as the berry of the laurel.[10]  Well, we do
+not know what this wand that produced a seemingly magical effect upon you
+was really composed of.  You did not notice the metal employed in the
+wire, which you say communicated a thrill to the sensitive nerves in the
+palm of the hand.  You cannot tell how far it might have been the vehicle
+of some fluid force in nature.  Or still more probably, whether the pores
+of your hand insensibly imbibed, and communicated to the brain, some of
+those powerful narcotics from which the Buddhists and the Arabs make
+unguents that induce visionary hallucinations, and in which substances
+undetected in the hollow of the wand, or the handle of the wand itself,
+might be steeped.[11]  One thing we do know, namely, that amongst the
+ancients, and especially in the East, the construction of wands for
+magical purposes was no commonplace mechanical craft, but a special and
+secret art appropriated to men who cultivated with assiduity all that was
+then known of natural science in order to extract from it agencies that
+might appear supernatural.  Possibly, then, the rods or wands of the East,
+of which Scripture makes mention, were framed upon some principles of
+which we in our day are very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack
+science for the same secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation of
+the material employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible to
+natural philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or
+divination and enchantment by wands.  The staff, or wand, of which you
+tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal.
+Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto
+scientifically analyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptional
+temperaments, which may account for the fact that iron and crystal have
+been favourites with all professed mystics, ancient and modern.  The
+Delphic Pythoness had her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and many
+persons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball of crystal but
+what they begin to see visions.  I suspect that a philosophical cause for
+such seemingly preternatural effects of crystal and iron will be found in
+connection with the extreme impressionability to changes in temperatures
+which is the characteristic both of crystal and iron.  But if these
+materials do contain certain powers over exceptional constitutions, we do
+not arrive at a supernatural but at a natural phenomenon."
+
+"Still," said I, "even granting that your explanatory hypotheses hit or
+approach the truth;--still what a terrible power you would assign to man's
+will over men's reason and deeds!"
+
+"Man's will," answered Faber, "has over men's deeds and reason, habitual
+and daily, power infinitely greater and, when uncounterbalanced,
+infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in
+magic.  Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind it
+calamities little less dire than slaughter.  Man's will frames, but it
+also corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion; sets the world
+mad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts by
+the wisdom of brother-like mercy.  You revolt at the exceptional, limited
+sway over some two or three individuals which the arts of a sorcerer (if
+sorcerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the very moment in which you
+were perplexed and appalled by such sway, or by your reluctant belief in
+it, your will was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and wither the
+hopes of millions!"
+
+"My will!  What engine?"
+
+"A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and directed
+by your will, to steal from the minds of other men their persuasion of the
+soul's everlasting Hereafter."
+
+I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale.
+
+"And if we accept Bacon's theory of 'secret sympathy,' or the plainer
+physiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidly
+impressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity with
+such influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you
+to evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray.  Grant that
+the Margrave who still haunts your mind did really, by some occult,
+sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder, did influence the
+servant-woman's vulgar desire to pry into the secrets of her ill-fated
+master, or the old maid's covetous wish and envious malignity: what could
+this awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty adviser, to a mind
+predisposed to accept the advice?"
+
+"You forget one example which destroys your argument,--the spell which
+this mysterious fascinator could cast upon a creature so pure from all
+guilt as Lilian!"
+
+"Will you forgive me if I answer frankly?"
+
+"Speak."
+
+"Your Lilian is spotless and pure as you deem her, and the fascination,
+therefore, attempts no lure through a sinful desire; it blends with its
+attraction no sentiment of affection untrue to yourself.  Nay, it is
+justice to your Lilian, and may be melancholy comfort to you, to state my
+conviction, based on the answers my questions have drawn from her, that
+you were never more cherished by her love than when that love seemed to
+forsake you.  Her imagination impressed her with the illusion that through
+your love for her you were threatened with a great peril.  What seemed the
+levity of her desertion was the devotion of self-sacrifice.  And, in her
+strange, dream-led wanderings, do not think that she was conscious of the
+fascination you impute to this mysterious Margrave: in her belief it was
+your own guardian angel that guided her steps, and her pilgrimage was
+ordained to disarm the foe that menaced you, and dissolve the spell that
+divided her life from yours!  But had she not, long before this, willingly
+prepared herself to be so deceived?  Had not her fancies been
+deliberately encouraged to dwell remote from the duties we are placed on
+the earth to perform?  The loftiest faculties in our nature are those that
+demand the finest poise, not to fall from their height and crush all the
+walls that they crown.  With exquisite beauty of illustration, Hume says
+of the dreamers of 'bright fancies,' 'that they may be compared to those
+angels whom the Scriptures represent as covering their eyes with their
+wings.'  Had you been, like my nephew, a wrestler for bread with the
+wilderness, what helpmate would your Lilian have been to you?  How often
+would you have cried out in justifiable anger, 'I, son of Adam, am on
+earth, not in Paradise!  Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth, and
+not in the skies with the seraphs!'  No Margrave, I venture to say, could
+have suspended the healthful affections, or charmed into danger the
+wide-awake soul of my Amy.  When she rocks in its cradle the babe the
+young parents intrust to her heed; when she calls the kine to the milking,
+the chicks to their corn; when she but flits through my room to renew the
+flowers on the stand, or range in neat order the books that I read, no
+spell on her fancy could lead her a step from the range of her provident
+cares!  At day she is contented to be on the commonplace earth; at evening
+she and I knock together at the one door of heaven, which opes to
+thanksgiving and prayer; and thanksgiving and prayer send us back, calm
+and hopeful, to the task that each morrow renews."
+
+I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid clearness of the
+Australian atmosphere, I saw the child he thus praised standing by the
+garden-gate, looking towards us, and though still distant she seemed near.
+I felt wroth with her.  My heart so cherished my harmless, defenceless
+Lilian, that I was jealous of the praise taken from her to be bestowed on
+another.
+
+"Each of us," said I, coldly, "has his or her own nature, and the uses
+harmonious to that nature's idiosyncrasy.  The world, I grant, would get
+on very ill if women were not more or less actively useful and quietly
+good, like your Amy.  But the world would lose standards that exalt and
+refine, if no woman were permitted to gain, through the indulgence of
+fancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived, while
+thought, alas! flowed out of fancy.  I do not wound you by citing your Amy
+as a type of the mediocre; I do not claim for Lilian the rank we accord to
+the type of genius.  But both are alike to such types in this: namely,
+that the uses of mediocrity are for every-day life, and the uses of
+genius, amidst a thousand mistakes which mediocrity never commits, are to
+suggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of the mediocre to a
+nobler level.  There would be fewer Amys in life if there were no Lilian!
+as there would be far fewer good men of sense if there were no erring
+dreamer of genius!"
+
+"You say well, Allen Fenwick.  And who should be so indulgent to the
+vagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth to
+doubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not be
+mathematically proved?  'The human mind,' said Luther, 'is like a drunkard
+on horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other.' So the man
+who is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion, is always
+sure to set up some insane superstition of his own.  Open biographical
+volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion is a
+man who has faith in a nightmare.  See that type of the elegant
+sceptics,--Lord Herbert of Cherbury.  He is writing a book against
+Revelation; he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book is approved
+by his Maker, and the man who cannot believe in the miracles performed by
+his Saviour gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to himself.  Take the
+hardest and strongest intellect which the hardest and strongest race of
+mankind ever schooled and accomplished.  See the greatest of great men,
+the great Julius Caesar!  Publicly he asserts in the Senate that the
+immortality of the soul is a vain chimera.  He professes the creed which
+Roman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus, and denies all Divine
+interference in the affairs of the earth.  A great authority for the
+Materialists--they have none greater!  They can show on their side no
+intellect equal to Caesar's!  And yet this magnificent freethinker,
+rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his chariot muttering a
+charm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate the
+abstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he had
+consulted the omens.  What does all this prove?--a very simple truth.  Man
+has some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hunger and sexual love.
+Man has one instinct peculiar to himself, found universally (or with
+alleged exceptions in savage States so rare, that they do not affect the
+general law[12]),--an instinct of an invisible power without this earth,
+and of a life beyond the grave, which that power vouchsafes to his spirit.
+But the best of us cannot violate an instinct with impunity.  Resist
+hunger as long as you can, and, rather than die of starvation, your
+instinct will make you a cannibal; resist love when youth and nature impel
+to it, and what pathologist does not track one broad path into madness or
+crime?  So with the noblest instinct of all.  Reject the internal
+conviction by which the grandest thinkers have sanctioned the hope of the
+humblest Christian, and you are servile at once to some faith
+inconceivably more hard to believe.  The imagination will not be withheld
+from its yearnings for vistas beyond the walls of the flesh, and the span
+of the present hour.  Philosophy itself, in rejecting the healthful creeds
+by which man finds his safeguards in sober prayer and his guide through
+the wilderness of visionary doubt, invents systems compared to which the
+mysteries of theology are simple.  Suppose any man of strong, plain
+understanding had never heard of a Deity like Him whom we Christians
+adore, then ask this man which he can the better comprehend in his mind,
+and accept as a natural faith,--namely, the simple Christianity of his
+shepherd or the Pantheism of Spinoza?  Place before an accomplished critic
+(who comes with a perfectly unprejudiced mind to either inquiry), first,
+the arguments of David Hume against the gospel miracles, and then the
+metaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself.  This subtle philosopher,
+not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of matter,--not content, with
+Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind,--proceeds to a miracle greater
+than any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal.  He, being then alive and
+in the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether.  Nay, he confesses
+he cannot reason with any one who is stupid enough to think he has a self.
+His words are: 'What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of
+different perceptions or objects united together by certain relations, and
+supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity and
+identity.  If any one, upon serious and candid reflection, thinks he has a
+different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason with him no
+longer.' Certainly I would rather believe all the ghost stories upon
+record than believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and apart from
+the perceptions conveyed to me, no matter how,--just as I am distinct and
+apart from the furniture in my room, no matter whether I found it there or
+whether I bought it.  If some old cosmogonist asked you to believe that
+the primitive cause of the solar system was not to 'be traced to a Divine
+Intelligence, but to a nebulosity, originally so diffused that its
+existence can with difficulty be conceived, and that the origin of the
+present system of organized beings equally dispensed with the agency of a
+creative mind, and could be referred to molecules formed in the water by
+the power of attraction, till by modifications of cellular tissue in the
+gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another a
+Man,--would you not say this cosmogony could scarce have misled the human
+understanding even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry?  Yet such
+are the hypotheses to which the desire to philosophize away that simple
+proposition of a Divine First Cause, which every child can comprehend, led
+two of the greatest geniuses and profoundest reasoners of modern
+times,--La Place and La Marck.[13]  Certainly, the more you examine those
+arch phantasmagorists, the philosophers who would leave nothing in the
+universe but their own delusions, the more your intellectual pride may be
+humbled.  The wildest phenomena which have startled you are not more
+extravagant than the grave explanations which intellectual presumption
+adventures on the elements of our own organism and the relations between
+the world of matter and the world of ideas."
+
+Here our conversation stopped, for Amy had now joined us, and, looking up
+to reply, I saw the child's innocent face between me and the furrowed brow
+of the old man.
+
+[1] See, on the theory elaborated from this principle, Dr. Hibbert's
+interesting and valuable work on the "Philosophy of Apparitions."
+
+[2] What Faber here says is expressed with more authority by one of the
+most accomplished metaphysicians of our time (Sir W. Hamilton):
+
+"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing [than dreaming].  In
+this singular state a person performs a regular series of rational
+actions, and those frequently of the most difficult and delicate nature;
+and what is still more marvellous, with a talent to which he could make no
+pretension when awake.  (Cr. Ancillon, Essais Philos. ii. 161.)  His
+memory and reminiscence supply him with recollections of words and things
+which, perhaps, never were at his disposal in the ordinary state,--he
+speaks more fluently a more refined language.  And if we are to credit
+what the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to disbelieve, he has
+not only perception of things through other channels than the common
+organs of sense, but the sphere of his cognition is amplified to an extent
+far beyond the limits to which sensible perception is confined.  This
+subject is one of the most perplexing in the whole compass of philosophy;
+for, on the one hand, the phenomena are so remarkable that they cannot be
+believed, and yet, on the other, they are of so unambiguous and palpable a
+character, and the witnesses to their reality are so numerous, so
+intelligent, and so high above every suspicion of deceit, that it is
+equally impossible to deny credit to what is attested by such ample and un
+exceptionable evidence."--Sir W. Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics and
+Logic, vol. ii. p. 274.
+
+This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves the
+judgment so equally balanced that it finds it impossible to believe, and
+yet impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of mind in which a
+candid thinker should come to the examination of those more extraordinary
+phenomena which he has not himself yet witnessed, but the fair inquiry
+into which may be tendered to him by persons above the imputation of
+quackery and fraud.  Muffler, who is not the least determined, as he is
+certainly one of the most distinguished, disbelievers of mesmeric
+phenomena, does not appear to have witnessed, or at least to have
+carefully examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have seen that even the
+more extraordinary of those phenomena confirm, rather than contradict, his
+own general theories, and may be explained by the sympathies one sense has
+with another,--"the laws of reflection through the medium of the brain."
+(Physiology of the Senses, p. 1311.)  And again by the maxim "that the
+mental principle, or cause of the mental phenomena, cannot be confined to
+the brain, but that it exists in a latent state in every part of the
+organism." (Ibid., p. 1355.)  The "nerve power," contended for by Mr.
+Bain, also may suggest a rational solution of much that has seemed
+incredible to those physiologists who have not condescended to sift the
+genuine phenomena of mesmerism from the imposture to which, in all ages,
+the phenomena exhibited by what may be called the ecstatic temperament
+have been applied.
+
+[3] Descartes, L'Homme, vol. iv. p. 345. Cousin's Edition.
+
+[4] Ibid., p. 428.
+
+[5] Facts in Mesmerism.
+
+[6] La Magic et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquitd et an Moyen-Age.  Par L. F.
+Alfred Maury, Membre de Nnstitut. p. 225.
+
+[7] "She had no illusions when within doors."--Abercrombie, On the
+Intellectual Powers, p. 277. (15th Edition.)
+
+[8] Muller, Physiology of the Senses, Baley's translation, pp. 1068-1395,
+and elsewhere.  Mr. Bain, in his thoughtful and suggestive work on the
+"Senses and Intellect," makes very powerful use of these statements in
+support of his proposition, which Faber advances in other words, namely,
+"the return of the nervous currents exactly on their old track in revived
+sensations."
+
+[9] Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, namely, that the
+magician requires the interposition of a third imagination between his own
+and that of the consulting believer, that any learned adept in (so-called)
+magic will invariably refuse to exhibit without the presence of a third
+person.  Hence the author of "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magic," printed
+at Parisy 1852-53--a book less remarkable for its learning than for the
+earnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the art of
+which he records the history--insists much on the necessity of rigidly
+observing Le Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in an
+enchanter's experiments.
+
+[10] I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect of laurel-berries on
+the Seeress of Prevorst, corresponding with that asserted by Julius Faber
+in the text.
+
+[11] See for these unguents the work of M. Maury, before quoted, "La Magic
+et l'Astrologie," etc., p. 417.
+
+[12] It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances in which
+it has been asserted that a savage race has been found without recognition
+of a Deity and a future state would bear searching examination.  It is
+set forth, for example, in most of the popular works on Australia, that
+the Australian savages have no notion of a Deity or a Hereafter, that they
+only worship a devil, or evil spirit.  This assumption, though made more
+peremptorily, and by a greater number of writers than any similar one
+regarding other savages, is altogether erroneous, and has no other
+foundation than the ignorance of the writers.  The Australian savages
+recognize a Deity, but He is too august for a name in their own language;
+in English they call Him the Great Master,--an expression synonymous with
+"The Great Lord."  They believe in a hereafter of eternal joy, and place
+it amongst the stars.--See Strzelecki's Physical Description of New South
+Wales.
+
+[13] See the observations on La Place and La Marck in the Introduction to
+Kirby's "Bridgewater Treatise."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII.
+
+I turned back alone.  The sun was reddening the summits of the distant
+mountain-range, but dark clouds, that portended rain, were gathering
+behind my way and deepening the shadows in many a chasm and hollow which
+volcanic fires had wrought on the surface of uplands undulating like
+diluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell.  I
+wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought.  Could I
+acknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logical
+ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical
+Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer
+faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of
+youth?  I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by most
+as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a vehicle
+for guesses at various riddles of Nature, without or within us, which are
+free to the license of romance, though forbidden to the caution of
+science.  But, I--I--know unmistakably my own identity, my own positive
+place in a substantial universe.  And beyond that knowledge, what do I
+know?  Yet had Faber no ground for his startling parallels between the
+chimeras of superstition and the alternatives to faith volunteered by the
+metaphysical speculations of knowledge?  On the theorems of Condillac, I,
+in common with numberless contemporaneous students (for, in my youth,
+Condillac held sway in the schools, as now, driven forth from the schools,
+his opinions float loose through the talk and the scribble of men of the
+world, who perhaps never opened his page),--on the theorems of Condillac I
+had built up a system of thought designed to immure the swathed form of
+material philosophy from all rays and all sounds of a world not material,
+as the walls of some blind mausoleum shut out, from the mummy within, the
+whisper of winds and the gleaming of stars.
+
+And did not those very theorems, when carried out to their strict and
+completing results by the close reasonings of Hume, resolve my own living
+identity, the one conscious indivisible me, into a bundle of memories
+derived from the senses which had bubbled and duped my experience, and
+reduce into a phantom, as spectral as that of the Luminous Shadow, the
+whole solid frame of creation?
+
+While pondering these questions, the storm whose forewarnings I had
+neglected to heed burst forth with all the suddenness peculiar to the
+Australian climes.  The rains descended like the rushing of floods.  In
+the beds of watercourses, which, at noon, seemed dried up and exhausted,
+the torrents began to swell and to rave; the gray crags around them were
+animated into living waterfalls.  I looked round, and the landscape was as
+changed as a scene that replaces a scene on the player's stage.  I was
+aware that I had wandered far from my home, and I knew not what direction
+I should take to regain it.  Close at hand, and raised above the torrents
+that now rushed in many a gully and tributary creek, around and before me,
+the mouth of a deep cave, overgrown with bushes and creeping flowers
+tossed wildly to and fro between the rain from above and the spray of
+cascades below, offered a shelter from the storm.  I entered,--scaring
+innumerable flocks of bats striking against me, blinded by the glare of
+the lightning that followed me into the cavern, and hastening to resettle
+themselves on the pendants of stalactites, or the jagged buttresses of
+primaeval wall.
+
+From time to time the lightning darted into the gloom and lingered
+amongst its shadows; and I saw, by the flash, that the floors on which I
+stood were strewed with strange bones, some amongst them the fossilized
+relics of races destroyed by the Deluge.  The rain continued for more than
+two hours with unabated violence; then it ceased almost as suddenly as it
+had come on, and the lustrous moon of Australia burst from the clouds
+shining bright as an English dawn, into the hollows of the cave.  And then
+simultaneously arose all the choral songs of the wilderness,--creatures
+whose voices are heard at night,--the loud whir of the locusts, the
+musical boom of the bullfrog, the cuckoo note of the morepork, and,
+mournful amidst all those merrier sounds, the hoot of the owl, through the
+wizard she-oaks and the pale green of the gum-trees.
+
+I stepped forth into the open air and gazed, first instinctively on the
+heavens, next, with more heedful eye, upon the earth.  The nature of the
+soil bore the evidence of volcanic fires long since extinguished.  Just
+before my feet, the rays fell full upon a bright yellow streak in the
+block of quartz half imbedded in the soft moist soil.  In the midst of all
+the solemn thoughts and the intense sorrows which weighed upon heart and
+mind, that yellow gleam startled the mind into a direction remote from
+philosophy, quickened the heart to a beat that chimed with no household
+affections.  Involuntarily I stooped; impulsively I struck the block with
+the hatchet, or tomahawk, I carried habitually about me, for the purpose
+of marking the trees that I wished to clear from the waste of my broad
+domain.  The quartz was shattered by the stroke, and left disburied its
+glittering treasure.  My first glance had not deceived me.  I, vain seeker
+after knowledge, had, at least, discovered gold.  I took up the bright
+metal--gold!  I paused; I looked round; the land that just before had
+seemed to me so worthless took the value of Ophir.  Its features had
+before been as unknown to me as the Mountains of the Moon, and now my
+memory became wonderfully quickened.  I recalled the rough map of my
+possessions, the first careless ride round their boundaries.  Yes, the
+land on which I stood--for miles, to the spur of those farther
+mountains--the land was mine, and, beneath its surface, there was gold!  I
+closed my eyes; for some moments visions of boundless wealth, and of the
+royal power which such wealth could command, swept athwart my brain.  But
+my heart rapidly settled back to its real treasure.  "What matters," I
+sighed, "all this dross?  Could Ophir itself buy back to my Lilian's smile
+one ray of the light which gave 'glory to the grass and splendour to the
+flower'?"
+
+So muttering, I flung the gold into the torrent that raged below, and went
+on through the moonlight, sorrowing silently,--only thankful for the
+discovery that had quickened my reminiscence of the landmarks by which to
+steer my way through the wilderness.
+
+The night was half gone, for even when I had gained the familiar track
+through the pastures, the swell of the many winding creeks that now
+intersected the way obliged me often to retrace my steps; to find,
+sometimes, the bridge of a felled tree which had been providently left
+unremoved over the now foaming torrent, and, more than once, to swim
+across the current, in which swimmers less strong or less practised would
+have been dashed down the falls, where loose logs and torn trees went
+clattering and whirling: for I was in danger of life.  A band of the
+savage natives were stealthily creeping on my track,--the natives in those
+parts were not then so much awed by the white man as now.  A boomerang[1]
+had whirred by me, burying itself amongst the herbage close before my
+feet.  I had turned, sought to find and to face these dastardly foes; they
+contrived to elude me.  But when I moved on, my ear, sharpened by danger,
+heard them moving, too, in my rear.  Once only three hideous forms
+suddenly faced me, springing up from a thicket, all tangled with
+honeysuckles and creepers of blue and vermilion.  I walked steadily up to
+them.  They halted a moment or so in suspense; but perhaps they were
+scared by my stature or awed by my aspect; and the Unfamiliar, though
+Human, had terror for them, as the Unfamiliar, although but a Shadow, had
+had terror for me.  They vanished, and as quickly as if they had crept
+into the earth.
+
+At length the air brought me the soft perfume of my well-known acacias,
+and my house stood before me, amidst English flowers and English
+fruit-trees, under the effulgent Australian moon.  Just as I was opening
+the little gate which gave access from the pastureland into the garden, a
+figure in white rose up from under light, feathery boughs, and a hand was
+laid on my arm.  I started; but my surprise was changed into fear when I
+saw the pale face and sweet eyes of Lilian.
+
+"Heavens! you here! you! at this hour!  Lilian, what is this?"
+
+"Hush!" she whispered, clinging to me; "hush! do not tell: no one knows.
+I missed you when the storm came on; I have missed you ever since.  Others
+went in search of you and came back.  I could not sleep, but the rest are
+sleeping, so I stole down to watch for you.  Brother, brother, if any harm
+chanced to you, even the angels could not comfort me; all would be dark,
+dark!  But you are safe, safe, safe!"  And she clung to me yet closer.
+
+"Ah, Lilian, Lilian, your vision in the hour I first beheld you was indeed
+prophetic,--'each has need of the other.' Do you remember?"
+
+"Softly, softly," she said, "let me think!"  She stood quietly by my side,
+looking up into the sky, with all its numberless stars, and its solitary
+moon now sinking slow behind the verge of the forest.  "It comes back to
+me," she murmured softly,--"the Long ago,--the sweet Long ago!"
+
+I held my breath to listen.
+
+"There, there!" she resumed, pointing to the heavens; "do you see?  You
+are there, and my father, and--and--Oh! that terrible face, those serpent
+eyes, the dead man's skull!  Save me! save me!"
+
+She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her gently back towards the
+house.  As we gained the door which she had left open, the starlight
+shining across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face from my
+breast, and cast a hurried fearful look round the shining garden, then
+into the dim recess beyond the threshold.
+
+"It is there--there!--the Shadow that lured me on, whispering that if I
+followed it I should join my beloved.  False, dreadful Shadow! it will
+fade soon,--fade into the grinning horrible skull.  Brother, brother,
+where is my Allen?  Is he dead--dead--or is it I who am dead to him?"
+
+I could but clasp her again to my breast, and seek to mantle her shivering
+form with my dripping garments, all the while my eyes--following the
+direction which hers had taken--dwelt on the walls of the nook within the
+threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight.  And there I,
+too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of the
+mysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolved
+by my reason.  Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its light was far paler,
+its outline far more vague, than when I had beheld it before.  I took
+courage, as I felt Lilian's heart beating against my own.  I advanced, I
+crossed the threshold,--the Shadow was gone.
+
+"There is no Shadow here,--no phantom to daunt thee, my life's life," said
+I, bending over Lilian.
+
+"It has touched me in passing; I feel it--cold, cold, cold!" she answered
+faintly.
+
+I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck a light, watched
+over her.  At dawn there was a change in her face, and from that time
+health gradually left her; strength slowly, slowly, yet to me perceptibly,
+ebbed from her life away.
+
+[1] A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII.
+
+Months upon months have rolled on since the night in which Lilian had
+watched for my coming amidst the chilling airs--under the haunting moon.
+I have said that from the date of that night her health began gradually to
+fail, but in her mind there was evidently at work some slow revolution.
+Her visionary abstractions were less frequent; when they occurred, less
+prolonged.  There was no longer in her soft face that celestial serenity
+which spoke her content in her dreams, but often a look of anxiety and
+trouble.  She was even more silent than before; but when she did speak,
+there were now evident some struggling gleams of memory.  She startled us,
+at times, by a distinct allusion to the events and scenes of her early
+childhood.  More than once she spoke of commonplace incidents and mere
+acquaintances at L----.  At last she seemed to recognize Mrs. Ashleigh as
+her mother; but me, as Allen Fenwick, her betrothed, her bridegroom, no!
+Once or twice she spoke to me of her beloved as of a stranger to myself,
+and asked me not to deceive her--should she ever see him again?  There was
+one change in this new phase of her state that wounded me to the quick.
+She had always previously seemed to welcome my presence; now there were
+hours, sometimes days together, in which my presence was evidently painful
+to her.  She would become agitated when I stole into her room, make signs
+to me to leave her, grow yet more disturbed if I did not immediately obey,
+and become calm again when I was gone.
+
+Faber sought constantly to sustain my courage and administer to my hopes
+by reminding me of the prediction he had hazarded,--namely, that through
+some malady to the frame the reason would be ultimately restored.
+
+He said, "Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by the
+affectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart.  You were absent; the
+storm alarmed her, she missed you,--feared for you.  The love within her,
+not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite human
+tracks.  And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when you
+appeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yet
+irregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of awakened
+memory.  The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened exposure
+to the cold night-air, will account for the shock to her physical system,
+and the languor and waste of strength by which it has been succeeded."
+
+"Ay, and the Shadow that we both saw within the threshold.  What of that?"
+
+"Are there no records on evidence, which most physicians of very extended
+practice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less tend to
+confirm--no records of the singular coincidences between individual
+impressions which are produced by sympathy?  Now, whether you or your
+Lilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not.  Perhaps before it
+appeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to her by the
+Monks' Well.  Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it lured her
+through the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with dreams of
+you.  And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your fantasy, so
+abruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian!  Does this
+doctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two loved each other
+at first,--though, without it, love at first sight were in itself an
+incredible miracle,--does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy seem to you
+inadmissible?  Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the conjecture I
+before threw out.  Have certain organizations like that of Margrave the
+power to impress, through space, the imaginations of those over whom they
+have forced a control?  I know not.  But if they have, it is not
+supernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare and
+exceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect and so
+liable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been traced--as,
+if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of science--to
+one of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains that Nature
+shall act on Man."
+
+By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber.  I
+yearned for explanations; all guesses but bewildered me more.  In his
+family, with one exception, I found no congenial association.  His nephew
+seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature,--a young
+man of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically right
+where not tempted to wrong.  The same desire of gain which had urged him
+to gamble and speculate when thrown in societies rife with such example,
+led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labour.
+"Spes fovet agricolas," says the poet; the same Hope which entices the
+fish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man.  The young farmer's
+young wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more refinement of taste,
+more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she was inevitably levelled
+to his ends and pursuits; and, next to the babe in the cradle, no object
+seemed to her so important as that of guarding the sheep from the scab and
+the dingoes.  I was amazed to see how quietly a man whose mind was so
+stored by life and by books as that of Julius Faber--a man who had loved
+the clash of conflicting intellects, and acquired the rewards of
+fame--could accommodate himself to the cabined range of his kinsfolks'
+half-civilized existence, take interest in their trivial talk, find
+varying excitement in the monotonous household of a peasant-like farmer.
+I could not help saying as much to him once.  "My friend," replied the old
+man, "believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, is
+that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!"
+
+The only one of the family in which Faber was domesticated in whom I found
+an interest, to whose talk I could listen without fatigue, was the child
+Amy.  Simple though she was in language, patient of labour as the most
+laborious, I recognized in her a quiet nobleness of sentiment, which
+exalted above the commonplace the acts of her commonplace life.  She had
+no precocious intellect, no enthusiastic fancies, but she had an exquisite
+activity of heart.  It was her heart that animated her sense of duty, and
+made duty a sweetness and a joy.  She felt to the core the kindness of
+those around her; exaggerated, with the warmth of her gratitude, the
+claims which that kindness imposed.  Even for the blessing of life, which
+she shared with all creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeserved
+favour of the Creator, and thus was filled with religion, because she was
+filled with love.
+
+My interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened and
+not wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs had
+pierced my ear,--the night from which I secretly dated the mysterious
+agencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my mind
+and my life.  But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts in the
+pleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate intercourse
+that sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the harmless infant.
+Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning which Lilian evidently
+wished to convey to us--we, her mother and her husband--she was understood
+with as much ease by Amy, the unlettered child, as by Faber, the
+gray-haired thinker.
+
+"How is it,--how is it?" I asked, impatiently and jealously, of Faber.
+"Love is said to interpret where wisdom fails, and you yourself talk of
+the marvels which sympathy may effect between lover and beloved; yet when,
+for days together, I cannot succeed in unravelling Lilian's wish or her
+thought--and her own mother is equally in fault--you or Amy, closeted
+alone with her for five minutes, comprehend and are comprehended."
+
+"Allen," answered Faber, "Amy and I believe in spirit; and she, in whom
+mind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in such belief a sympathy which
+she has not, in that respect, with yourself, nor even with her mother.
+You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers.  Her mother has sense
+clear enough where habitual experience can guide it, but that sense is
+confused, and forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in which
+it has been accustomed to tread.  Amy and I through soul guess at soul,
+and though mostly contented with earth, we can both rise at times into
+heaven.  We pray."
+
+"Alas!" said I, half mournfully, half angrily, "when you thus speak of
+Mind as distinct from Soul, it was only in that Vision which you bid me
+regard as the illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapours,
+producing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or the
+inhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen the silver spark of the
+Soul distinct from the light of the Mind.  And holding, as I do, that all
+intellectual ideas are derived from the experiences of the body, whether I
+accept the theory of Locke, or that of Condillac, or that into which their
+propositions reach their final development in the wonderful subtlety of
+Hume, I cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the material
+substance,--much less follow its escape from the organic matter in which
+the principle of thought ceases with the principle of life.  When the
+metaphysician, contending for the immortality of the thinking faculty,
+analyzes Mind, his analysis comprehends the mind of the brute, nay, of the
+insect, as well as that of man.  Take Reid's definition of Mind, as the
+most comprehensive which I can at the moment remember: 'By the mind of a
+man we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, and
+wills.[1]  But this definition only distinguishes the mind of man from
+that of the brute by superiority in the same attributes, and not by
+attributes denied to the brute.  An animal, even an insect, thinks,
+remembers, reasons, and wills.[1]  Few naturalists will now support the
+doctrine that all the mental operations of brute or insect are to be
+exclusively referred to instincts; and, even if they do, the word
+'instinct' is a very vague word,--loose and large enough to cover an abyss
+which our knowledge has not sounded.  And, indeed, in proportion as an
+animal like the dog becomes cultivated by intercourse, his instincts grow
+weaker, and his ideas formed by experience (namely, his mind), more
+developed, often to the conquest of the instincts themselves.  Hence, with
+his usual candour, Dr. Abercrombie--in contending 'that everything mental
+ceases to exist after death, when we know that everything corporeal
+continues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption contrary to every rule of
+philosophical inquiry'--feels compelled, by his reasoning, to admit the
+probability of a future life even to the lower animals.  His words are:
+'To this anode of reasoning it has been objected that it would go to
+establish an immaterial principle in the lower animals which in them
+exhibits many of the phenomena of mind.  I have only to answer, Be it so.
+There are in the lower animals many of the phenomena of mind, and with
+regard to these, we also contend that they are entirely distinct from
+anything we know of the properties of matter, which is all that we mean,
+or can mean, by being immaterial.'[2]  Am I then driven to admit that if
+man's mind is immaterial and imperishable, so also is that of the ape and
+the ant?"
+
+"I own," said Faber, with his peculiar smile, arch and genial,
+"that if I were compelled to make that admission, it would not shock my
+pride.  I do not presume to set any limit to the goodness of the Creator;
+and should be as humbly pleased as the Indian, if in--
+
+   "'yonder sky,
+    My faithful dog should bear me company.'
+
+"You are too familiar with the works of that Titan in wisdom and error,
+Descartes, not to recollect the interesting correspondence between the
+urbane philosopher and our combative countryman, Henry More,[3] on this
+very subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Descartes
+insists on reducing what he calls the soul (l'ame) of brutes into the same
+kind of machines as man constructs from inorganized matter.  The learning,
+indeed, lavished on the insoluble question involved in the psychology of
+the inferior animals is a proof at least of the all-inquisitive, redundant
+spirit of man.[4] We have almost a literature in itself devoted to
+endeavours to interpret the language of brutes.[5]  Dupont de Nemours has
+discovered that dogs talk in vowels, using only two consonants, G, Z, when
+they are angry.  He asserts that cats employ the same vowels as dogs; but
+their language is more affluent in consonants, including M, N, B, R, V, F.
+How many laborious efforts have been made to define and to construe the
+song of the nightingale!  One version of that song, by Beckstein, the
+naturalist, published in 1840, I remember to have seen.  And I heard a
+lady, gifted with a singularly charming voice, chant the mysterious vowels
+with so exquisite a pathos, that one could not refuse to believe her when
+she declared that she fully comprehended the bird's meaning, and gave to
+the nightingale's warble the tender interpretation of her own woman's
+heart.
+
+"But leaving all such discussions to their proper place amongst the
+Curiosities of Literature, I come in earnest to the question you have so
+earnestly raised; and to me the distinction between man and the lower
+animals in reference to a spiritual nature designed for a future
+existence, and the mental operations whose uses are bounded to an
+existence on earth, seems ineffaceably clear.  Whether ideas or even
+perceptions be innate or all formed by experience is a speculation for
+metaphysicians, which, so far as it affects the question of as immaterial
+principle, I am quite willing to lay aside.  I can well understand that a
+materialist may admit innate ideas in Man, as he must admit them in the
+instinct of brutes, tracing them to hereditary predispositions.  On the
+other hand, we know that the most devout believers in our spiritual nature
+have insisted, with Locke, in denying any idea, even of the Deity, to be
+innate.
+
+"But here comes my argument.  I care not how ideas are formed,--the
+material point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed?  The
+ideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideas
+must be inherent.  I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain English
+word, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity,' employed by Kant.
+And by capacity I mean the passive power[6] to receive ideas, whether in
+man or in any living thing by which ideas are received.  A man and an
+elephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas suited to the
+several places in the universe held by each.
+
+"The more I look through Nature the more I find that on all varieties of
+organized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive the
+impressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to the
+uses each creature is intended to derive from them.  I find, then, that
+Man alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of a God, of
+Soul, of Worship, of a Hereafter.  I see no trace of such a capacity in
+the inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be refined by
+culture, is such capacity ever apparent in them.
+
+"But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently general
+in any given species of creature to be called universal to that species,
+and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughout
+Nature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for the
+distinct use and conservation of the species to which they are given.
+
+"It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowed
+on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of a
+Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence that
+Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his own study and
+observation.  He must build a hut before he can build a Parthenon; he must
+believe with the savage or the heathen before he can believe with the
+philosopher or Christian.  In a word, in all his capacities, Man has only
+given to him, not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means to
+strive towards the Perfect.  And thus one of the most accomplished of
+modern reasoners, to whose lectures you must have listened with delight,
+in your college days, says well:--
+
+   "'Accordingly the sciences always studied with keenest interest are
+     those in a state of progress and uncertainty; absolute certainty and
+     absolute completion would be the paralysis of any study, and the last
+     worst calamity that could befall Man, as he is at present
+     constituted, would be that full and final possession of speculative
+     truth which he now vainly anticipates as the consummation of his
+     intellectual happiness.'[7]
+
+"Well, then, in all those capacities for the reception of impressions from
+external Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see the
+evidence of Man's Soul.  I can understand why the inferior animal has no
+capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply because the
+inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future life, may not
+therein preserve the sense of its identity.  I can understand even why
+that sympathy with each other which we men possess and which constitutes
+the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not possessed by the
+lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional degree) even
+where they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or ants; because
+men are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life to
+come, and the bond between the brute ceases here.
+
+"Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestowed
+distinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him from
+the other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life upon
+this earth.
+
+   "'Man alone,' says Muller, 'can conceive abstract notions; and it is in
+     abstract notions--such as time, space, matter, spirit, light, form,
+     quantity, essence--that man grounds, not only all philosophy, all
+     science, but all that practically improves one generation for the
+     benefit of the next.'
+
+"And why?  Because all these abstract notions unconsciously lead the mind
+away from the material into the immaterial,--from the present into the
+future.  But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you
+must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence whom
+Nature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by capacities
+for which there are no available objects.  How nobly and how truly has
+Chalmers said:--
+
+   "'What inference shall we draw from this remarkable law in Nature that
+     there is nothing waste and nothing meaningless in the feelings and
+     faculties wherewith living creatures are endowed?  For each desire
+     there is a counterpart object; for each faculty there is room and
+     opportunity for exercise either in the present or the coming
+     futurity.  Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man would be an
+     exception to this law,-he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature,
+     with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no antitype
+     to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never
+     were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the
+     whole history of his being!
+
+                 .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+   "'With the inferior animals there is a certain squareness of
+     adjustment, if we may so term it, between each desire and its
+     correspondent gratification.  The one is evenly met by the other, and
+     there is a fulness and definiteness of enjoyment up to the capacity
+     of enjoyment.  Not so with Man, who, both from the vastness of his
+     propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels himself chained
+     and beset in a field too narrow for him.  He alone labours under the
+     discomfort of an incongruity between his circumstances and his
+     powers; and unless there be new circumstances awaiting him in a more
+     advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature's products here,
+     would turn out to be the greatest of her failures.'[8]
+
+"This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man, not that he has a
+mind--because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though in a
+lesser degree--but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as soon as
+he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths not needed
+for self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to yonder ox and
+opossum,--namely, the nature of Deity, Soul, Hereafter.  And in the
+recognition of these truths, the Human society, that excels the society of
+beavers, bees, and ants, by perpetual and progressive improvement on the
+notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its basis.  Thus, in fact,
+this world is benefited for men by their belief in the next, while the
+society of brutes remains age after age the same.  Neither the bee nor the
+beaver has, in all probability, improved since the Deluge.
+
+"But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse of
+prayer and worship.  It does not touch my argument when a philosopher of
+the school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, 'that the origin of prayer is
+in Man's ignorance of the phenomena of Nature.'  That it is fear or
+ignorance which, 'when rocked the mountains or when groaned the ground,
+taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray.'  My answer is, the brutes are
+much more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than Man is; the bird
+and the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock and the
+ground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it does not
+lead them to prayer.  If my theory be right that Soul is to be sought not
+in the question whether mental ideas be innate or formed by experience, by
+the sense, by association or habit, but in the inherent capacity to
+receive ideas, then, the capacity bestowed on Man alone, to be impressed
+by Nature herself with the idea of a Power superior to Nature, with which
+Power he can establish commune, is a proof that to Man alone the Maker has
+made Nature itself proclaim His existence,--that to Man alone the Deity
+vouchsafes the communion with Himself which comes from prayer."
+
+"Even were this so," said I, "is not the Creator omniscient?  If all-wise,
+all-foreseeing?  If all-foreseeing, all-pre-ordaining?  Can the prayer of
+His creature alter the ways of His will?"
+
+"For the answer to a question," returned Faber, "which is not unfrequently
+asked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you to the skilled
+theologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner over that ford
+of doubt which is crossed every day by the infant.  But as we have not
+their books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my reply as a
+necessary and logical sequence from the propositions I have sought to
+ground on the plain observation of Nature.  I can only guess at the
+Deity's Omniscience, or His modes of enforcing His power by the
+observation of His general laws; and of all His laws, I know of none more
+general than the impulse which bids men pray,--which makes Nature so act,
+that all the phenomena of Nature we can conceive, however startling and
+inexperienced, do not make the brute pray, but there is not a trouble that
+can happen to Man, but what his impulse is to pray,--always provided,
+indeed, that he is not a philosopher.  I say not this in scorn of the
+philosopher, to whose wildest guess our obligations are infinite, but
+simply because for all which is impulsive to Man, there is a reason in
+Nature which no philosophy can explain away.  I do not, then, bewilder
+myself by seeking to bind and limit the Omniscience of the Deity to my
+finite ideas.  I content myself with supposing that somehow or other, He
+has made it quite compatible with His Omniscience that Man should obey the
+impulse which leads him to believe that, in addressing a Deity, he is
+addressing a tender, compassionate, benignant Father, and in that
+obedience shall obtain beneficial results.  If that impulse be an
+illusion, then we must say that Heaven governs the earth by a lie; and
+that is impossible, because, reasoning by analogy, all Nature is
+truthful,--that is, Nature gives to no species instincts or impulses which
+are not of service to it.  Should I not be a shallow physician if, where I
+find in the human organization a principle or a property so general that I
+must believe it normal to the healthful conditions of that organization, I
+should refuse to admit that Nature intended it for use?  Reasoning by all
+analogy, must I not say the habitual neglect of its use must more or less
+injure the harmonious well-being of the whole human system?  I could have
+much to add upon the point in dispute by which the creed implied in your
+question would enthrall the Divine mercy by the necessities of its Divine
+wisdom, and substitute for a benignant Deity a relentless Fate.  But here
+I should exceed my province.  I am no theologian.  Enough for me that in
+all my afflictions, all my perplexities, an impulse, that I obey as an
+instinct, moves me at once to prayer.  Do I find by experience that the
+prayer is heard, that the affliction is removed, the doubt is solved?
+That, indeed, would be presumptuous to say.  But it is not presumptuous to
+think that by the efficacy of prayer my heart becomes more fortified
+against the sorrow, and my reason more serene amidst the doubt."
+
+I listened, and ceased to argue.  I felt as if in that solitude, and in
+the pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growing
+languid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse.  My pride took alarm.  I
+had so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified the
+search after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that I
+had relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame.  I resolved to
+resume my once favourite philosophical pursuits, re-examine and complete
+the Work to which I had once committed my hopes of renown; and,
+simultaneously, a restless desire seized me to communciate, though but at
+brief intervals, with other minds than those immediately within my
+reach,--minds fresh from the old world, and reviving the memories of its
+vivid civilization.  Emigrants frequently passed my doors, but I had
+hitherto shrunk from tendering the hospitalities so universally accorded
+in the colony.  I could not endure to expose to such rough strangers my
+Lilian's mournful affliction, and that thought was not less intolerable to
+Mrs. Ashleigh.  I now hastily constructed a log-building a few hundred
+yards from the house, and near the main track taken by travellers through
+the spacious pastures.  I transported to this building my books and
+scientific instruments.  In an upper story I placed my telescopes and
+lenses, my crucibles and retorts.  I renewed my chemical experiments; I
+sought to invigorate my mind by other branches of science which I had
+hitherto less cultured,--meditated new theories on Light and Colour,
+collected specimens in Natural History, subjected animalcules to my
+microscope, geological fossils to my hammer.  With all these quickened
+occupations of thought, I strove to distract myself from sorrow, and
+strengthen my reason against the, illusion of my fantasy.  The Luminous
+Shadow was not seen again on my wall, and the thought of Margrave himself
+was banished.
+
+In this building I passed many hours of each day; more and more earnestly
+plunging my thoughts into depths of abstract study, as Lilian's
+unaccountable dislike to my presence became more and more decided.  When I
+thus ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted hers, my heart's
+occupation was gone.  I had annexed to the apartment reserved for myself
+in the log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I could accommodate
+passing strangers.  I learned to look forward to their coming with
+interest, and to see them depart with regret; yet, for the most part, they
+were of the ordinary class of colonial adventurers,--bankrupt tradesmen,
+unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics, hordes of unskilled labourers, now and
+then a briefless barrister, or a sporting collegian who had lost his all
+on the Derby.  One day, however, a young man of education and manners that
+unmistakably proclaimed the cultured gentleman of Europe, stopped at my
+door.  He was a cadet of a noble Prussian family, which for some political
+reasons had settled itself in Paris; there he had become intimate with
+young French nobles, and living the life of a young French noble had soon
+scandalized his German parents, forestalled his slender inheritance, and
+been compelled to fly his father's frown and his tailor's bills.  All this
+he told me with a lively frankness which proved how much the wit of a
+German can be quickened in the atmosphere of Paris.  An old college
+friend, of birth inferior to his own, had been as unfortunate in seeking
+to make money as this young prodigal had been an adept in spending it.
+The friend, a few years previously, had accompanied other Germans in a
+migration to Australia, and was already thriving; the spendthrift noble
+was on his way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty
+miles distant from my house.  This young man was unlike any German I ever
+met.  He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman
+gives to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean.  He owned
+himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not only
+disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, the
+happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,--sure that he should be rich
+before he was thirty.  How and wherefore rich, he could have no more
+explained than I can square the circle.  When the grand serious German
+nature does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly French!
+
+I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted profligate's babble,
+as we sat by my rude fireside,--I, sombre man of science and sorrow, he,
+smiling child of idleness and pleasure, so much one of Nature's
+courtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in his
+dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck into
+his belt, I would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as critic
+over the holiday world not to have said, "There smiles the genius beyond
+my laws, the born darling of the Graces, who in every circumstance, in
+every age, like Aristippus, would have socially charmed; would have been
+welcome to the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius, to the boudoirs of a
+Montespan or a Pompadour; have lounged through the Mulberry Gardens with a
+Rochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the death-cart, with a
+Richelieu and a Lauzun, a gentleman's disdain of a mob!"
+
+I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his careless
+lips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that light talk was
+flung forth the name of Margrave.
+
+"Margrave!" I exclaimed.  "Pardon me.  What of him?"
+
+"What of him!  I asked if, by chance, you knew the only Englishman I ever
+had the meanness to envy?"
+
+"Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of another."
+
+"Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two Margraves!  The one of
+whom I speak flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of the
+Bourse a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood-royal,
+eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendour, our jeunesse doree in good looks
+and hair-brain adventures, and, strangest of all, filled his salons with
+philosophers and charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting the
+gravest dons of the schools by bringing them face to face with the most
+impudent quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers,--and yet, withal, himself
+so racy and charming, so bon prince, so bon enfant!  For six months he was
+the rage at Paris: perhaps he might have continued to be the rage there
+for six years, but all at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as it had
+flashed.  Is this the Margrave whom you know?"
+
+"I should not have thought the Margrave whom I knew could have reconciled
+his tastes to the life of cities."
+
+"Nor could this man: cities were too tame for him.  He has gone to some
+far-remote wilds in the East,--some say in search of the Philosopher's
+Stone; for he actually maintained in his house a Sicilian adventurer, who,
+when at work on that famous discovery, was stifled by the fumes of his own
+crucible.  After that misfortune, Margrave took Paris in disgust, and we
+lost him."
+
+"So this is the only Englishman whom you envy!  Envy him?  Why?"
+
+"Because he is the only Englishman I ever met who contrived to be rich and
+yet free from the spleen; I envied him because one had only to look at his
+face and see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which your countrymen
+seem to be so heartily tired.  But now that I have satisfied your
+curiosity, pray satisfy mine.  Who and what is this Englishman?"
+
+"Who and what was he supposed at Paris to be?"
+
+"Conjectures were numberless.  One of your countrymen suggested that which
+was the most generally favoured.  This gentleman, whose name I forget, but
+who was one of those old roues who fancy themselves young because they
+live with the young, no sooner set eyes upon Margrave, than he exclaimed,
+'Louis Grayle come to life again, as I saw him forty-four years ago!  But
+no--still younger, still handsomer--it must be his son!"
+
+"Louis Grayle, who was said to be murdered at Aleppo?"
+
+"The same.  That strange old man was enormously rich; but it seems that he
+hated his lawful heirs, and left behind him a fortune so far below that
+which he was known to possess that he must certainly have disposed of it
+secretly before his death.  Why so dispose of it, if not to enrich some
+natural son, whom, for private reasons, he might not have wished to
+acknowledge, or point out to the world by the signal bequest of his will?
+All that Margrave ever said of himself and the source of his wealth
+confirmed this belief.  He frankly proclaimed himself a natural son,
+enriched by a father whose name he knew not nor cared to know."
+
+"It is true.  And Margrave quitted Paris for the East.  When?"
+
+"I can tell you the date within a day or two, for his flight preceded mine
+by a week; and, happily, all Paris was so busy in talking of it, that I
+slipped away without notice."
+
+And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled me to hear, for it
+was in that very month, and about that very day, that the Luminous Shadow
+had stood within my threshold.
+
+The young count now struck off into other subjects of talk: nothing more
+was said of Margrave.  An hour or two afterwards he went on his way, and I
+remained long gazing musingly on the embers of the dying glow on my
+hearth.
+
+[1] "Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their relative
+proportion in man as compared with all other animals, yet the same in kind
+and manner of operation in both?  To this question we must give at once an
+affirmative answer.  The expression of Cuvier, regarding the faculty of
+reasoning in lower animals, 'Leur intelligence execute des operations du
+meme genre,' is true in its full sense.  We can in no manner define reason
+so as to exclude acts which are at every moment present to our
+observation, and which we find in many instances to contravene the natural
+instincts of the species.  The demeanour and acts of the dog in reference
+to his master, or the various uses to which he is put by man, are as
+strictly logical as those we witness in the ordinary transactions of
+life."--Sir Henry Holland, chapters on "Mental Physiology," p. 220.
+
+The whole of the chapter on Instincts and Habits in this work should be
+read in connection with the passage just quoted.  The work itself, at once
+cautious and suggestive, is not one of the least obligations which
+philosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations of English medical
+men.
+
+[2] Abercrombie's Intellectual Powers, p. 26. (15th Edition.)
+
+[3] OEuvres de Descartes, vol. x. p. 178, et seq. (Cousin's Edition.)
+
+[4] M. Tissot the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Dijon, in his
+recent work, "La Vie dans l'Homme," p. 255, gives a long and illustrious
+list of philosophers who assign a rational soul (ame) to the inferior
+animals, though he truly adds, "that they have not always the courage of
+their opinion."
+
+[5] Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed on this
+subject may be gleaned from the sprightly work of Pierquin de Gemblouz,
+"Idiomologie des Animaux," published at Paris, 1844.
+
+[6] "Faculty is active power: capacity is passive power."--Sir W.
+Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. i. p.178.
+
+[7] Sir W. Hamilton's "Lectures," vol. i. p. 10.
+
+[8] Chalmers, "Bridgewater Treatise," vol. ii. pp. 28, 30.  Perhaps I
+should observe, that here and elsewhere in the dialogues between Faber and
+Fenwick, it has generally been thought better to substitute the words of
+the author quoted for the mere outline or purport of the quotation which
+memory afforded to the interlocutor.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V7 ***
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