CHAPTER LXIV. 

Lilian's wondrous gentleness of nature did not desert her in thesuspension of her reason. She was habitually calm, --very silent; when shespoke it was rarely on earthly things, on things familiar to her past, things one could comprehend. Her thought seemed to have quitted theearth, seeking refuge in some imaginary heaven. She spoke of wanderingswith her father as if he were living still; she did not seem to understandthe meaning we attach to the word "Death. " She would sit for hoursmurmuring to herself: when one sought to catch the words, they seemed inconverse with invisible spirits. We found it cruel to disturb her atsuch times, for if left unmolested, her face was serene, --more serenelybeautiful than I had seen it even in our happiest hours; but when wecalled 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 wedid not seem to observe her, she would quietly resume her once favouriteaccomplishments, --drawing, music. And in these her young excellence wasstill apparent, only the drawings were strange and fantastic: they had aresemblance to those with which the painter Blake, himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave, "--faces ofexquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace, coming forth from the bellsof flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, theiroutlines melting away in fountain or in flower. So with her music: hermother could not recognize the airs she played, for a while so sweetly andwith so ineffable a pathos, that one could scarcely hear her withoutweeping; 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 fromothers. To her mother she gave no name, seemed pleased to see her, butnot sensibly to miss her when away; me she called her brother: if longerabsent than usual, me she missed. When, after the toils of the day, Icame to join her, even if she spoke not, her sweet face brightened. Whenshe 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 andglance over her shoulder to see that I was watching her, and point to thedrawings with a smile of strange significance, as if they conveyed in somecovert allegory messages meant for me; so, at least, I interpreted hersmile, and taught myself to say, "Yes, Lilian, I understand!"

And more than once, when I had so answered, she rose, and kissed myforehead. I thought my heart would have broken when I felt thatspirit-like melancholy kiss. 

And yet how marvellously the human mind teaches itself to extractconsolations from its sorrows. The least wretched of my hours were thosethat I had passed in that saddened room, seeking how to establishfragments of intercourse, invent signs, by which each might interpreteach, between the intellect I had so laboriously cultured, so arrogantlyvaunted, and the fancies wandering through the dark, deprived of theirguide in reason. It was something even of joy to feel myself needed forher guardianship, endeared and yearned for still by some unshatteredinstinct of her heart; and when, parting from her for the night, I stolethe moment in which on her soft face seemed resting least of shadow, toask, in a trembling whisper, "Lilian, are the angels watching over you?"and she would answer "Yes, " sometimes in words, sometimes with amysterious happy smile--then--then I went to my lonely room, comfortedand thankful. 

CHAPTER LXV. 

The blow that had fallen on my hearth effectually, inevitably killed allthe slander that might have troubled me in joy. Before the awe of a greatcalamity the small passions of a mean malignity slink abashed. I hadrequested Mrs. Ashleigh not to mention the vile letter which Lilian hadreceived. I would not give a triumph to the unknown calumniator, norwring forth her vain remorse, by the pain of acknowledging an indignity tomy darling's honour; yet, somehow or other, the true cause of Lilian'saffliction had crept out, --perhaps through the talk of servants, --and thepublic shock was universal. By one of those instincts of justice that liedeep in human hearts, though in ordinary moments overlaid by many aworldly layer, all felt (all mothers felt especially) that innocence alonecould have been so unprepared for reproach. The explanation I hadpreviously given, discredited then, was now accepted without a question. Lilian's present state accounted for all that ill nature had beforemisconstrued. Her good name was restored to its maiden whiteness, by thefate that had severed the ties of the bride. The formal dwellers on theHill vied with the franker, warmer-hearted households of Low Town in thenameless attentions by which sympathy and respect are rather delicatelyindicated than noisily proclaimed. Could Lilian have then recovered andbeen sensible of its repentant homage, how reverently that petty worldwould have thronged around her! And, ah! could fortune and man's esteemhave atoned for the blight of hopes that had been planted and cherished onground beyond their reach, ambition and pride might have been wellcontented with the largeness of the exchange that courted theiracceptance. Patients on patients crowded on me. Sympathy with my sorrowseemed to create and endear a more trustful belief in my skill. But theprofession I had once so enthusiastically loved became to me wearisome, insipid, distasteful; the kindness heaped on me gave no comfort, --it butbrought before me more vividly the conviction that it came too late toavail me: it could not restore to me the mind, the love, the life of mylife, which lay dark and shattered in the brain of my guileless Lilian. Secretly I felt a sullen resentment. I knew that to the crowd theresentment was unjust. The world itself is but an appearance; who canblame it if appearances guide its laws? But to those who had beendetached from the crowd by the professions of friendship, --those who, whenthe slander was yet new, and might have been awed into silence had theystood 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 hadtriumphed: Jane was Mrs. Ashleigh Sumner. Her mind was, perhaps, softenednow that the object which had sharpened its worldly faculties wasaccomplished: but in vain, on first hearing of my affliction, had thisshe-Machiavel owned a humane remorse, and, with all her keen comprehensionof each facility that circumstances gave to her will, availed herself ofthe general compassion to strengthen the popular reaction in favour ofLilian's assaulted honour; in vain had she written to me with a gentlenessof sympathy foreign to her habitual characteristics; in vain besought meto call on her; in vain waylaid and accosted me with a humility thatalmost implored forgiveness. I vouchsafed no reproach, but I could implyno pardon. I put between her and my great sorrow the impenetrable wall ofmy 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 shrillnesswould have been as loud to defend as it had been to defame; that vileletter might never have been written. Whoever its writer, it surely wasone of the babblers who took their malice itself from the jest or the nodof their female despot; and the writer might have justified herself insaying she did but coarsely proclaim what the oracle of worldly opinion, and the early friend of Lilian's own mother, had authorized her tobelieve. 

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to thecircumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanicalround. That cordial brotherhood with his patients, which is the truephysician's happiest gift and humanest duty, forsook my breast. Thewarning words of Mrs. Poyntz had come true. A patient that monopolizedmy thought awaited me at my own hearth! My conscience became troubled; Ifelt that my skill was lessened. I said to myself, "The physician who, onentering the sick-room, feels, while there, something that distracts thefinest powers of his intellect from the sufferer's case is unfit for hiscalling. " A year had scarcely passed since my fatal wedding day, before Ihad formed a resolution to quit L---- and abandon my profession; and myresolution was confirmed, and my goal determined, by a letter I receivedfrom Julius Faber. 

I had written at length to him, not many days after the blow that hadfallen on me, stating all circumstances as calmly and clearly as my griefwould allow; for I held his skill at a higher estimate than that of anyliving brother of my art, and I was not without hope in the efficacy ofhis advice. The letter I now received from him had been begun, andcontinued at some length, before my communication reached him; and thisearlier portion contained animated and cheerful descriptions of hisAustralian life and home, which contrasted with the sorrowful tone of thesupplement written in reply to the tidings with which I had wrung hisfriendly and tender heart. In this, the latter part of his letter, hesuggested that if time had wrought no material change for the better, itmight be advisable to try the effect of foreign travel. Scenes entirelynew might stimulate observation, and the observation of things externalwithdraw the sense from that brooding over images delusively formedwithin, which characterized the kind of mental alienation I had described. "Let any intellect create for itself a visionary world, and all reasoningsbuilt on it are fallacious: the visionary world vanishes in proportion aswe can arouse a predominant interest in the actual. "

This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a practitionerto the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then proceeded to give mea 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 adrowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions ofhis letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country inwhich he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere; thefreshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery, with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransackedquarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to transferto the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit no longer athome in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods that shrank fromall social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness for the desolatehearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if unveiled. As if to givepractical excuse and reason for the idea that seized me, Julius Fabermentioned, incidentally, that the house and property of a wealthyspeculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on sale at a price whichseemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to his judgment, far belowthe 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 whichpreceded the discovery of its earliest gold-fields. But his geologicalscience had convinced him that strata within and around the property nowfor sale were auriferous, and his intelligence enabled him to predict howinevitably man would be attracted towards the gold, and how surely thegold would fertilize the soil and enrich its owners. He described thehouse thus to be sold--in case I might know of a purchaser. It had beenbuilt at a cost unusual in those early times, and by one who clung toEnglish tastes amidst Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settlerwould 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 bridewith wants less simple than those which now sufficed for my darlingLilian. 

This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the day onwhich 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 ifFaber's descriptions of the country and its life, which in themselves wereextremely spirited and striking, would arouse Lilian's interest. At firstshe did not seem to heed me while I read; but when I came to Faber'sloving account of little Amy, Lilian turned her eyes towards me, andevidently listened with attention. He wrote how the child had alreadybecome the most useful person in the simple household. How watchful thequickness of the heart had made the service of the eye; all theirassociations 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 eyesthe rude furniture of the log-house grew inviting with English neatness;she took charge of the dairy; she had made the garden gay with flowersselected from the wild, and suggested the trellised walk, already coveredwith hardy vine. She was their confidant in every plan of improvement, their comforter in every anxious doubt, their nurse in every passingailment, her very smile a refreshment in the weariness of daily toil. "How all that is best in womanhood, " wrote the old man, with theenthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful genius, --"howall that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into flower from thebud of the infant's soul! The atmosphere seems to suit it, --thechild-woman in the child-world!"

I heard Lilian sigh; I looked towards her furtively; tears stood in hersoftened eyes; her lip was quivering. Presently, she began to rub herright hand over the left--over the wedding-ring--at first slowly; thenwith 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 seeit, do you?"

"There is no stain, never was, " said I; "the hand is white as your owninnocence, or the lily from which you take your name. "

"Hush! you do not know my name. I will whisper it. Soft!--my name isNightshade! Do you want to know where the lily is now, brother? I willtell 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 thatwhispers the bells, and the bells ring out what it whispers, louder andlouder, "'Stain on lily Shame on lily, Wither lily. '

"If she hears what the wind whispers to the bells, she will creep awayinto the dark, and then she, too, will turn to Nightshade. "

"Lilian, look up, awake! You have been in a long, long dream: it ispassing away. Lilian, my beloved, my blessed Lilian!"

Never till then had I heard from her even so vague an allusion to thefatal calumny and its dreadful effect, and while her words now pierced myheart, it beat, amongst its pangs, with a thrilling hope. 

But, alas! the idea that had gleamed upon her had vanished already. Shemurmured something about Circles of Fire, and a Veiled Woman in blackgarments; 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) Iheard her cry out. I hastened to her side. She was still asleep, butthere was an anxious labouring expression on her young face, and yet notan expression wholly of pain--for her lips were parted with a smile, --thatglad yet troubled smile with which one who has been revolving some subjectof perplexity or fear greets a sudden thought that seems to solve theriddle, or prompt the escape from danger; and as I softly took her handshe returned my gentle pressure, and inclining towards me, said, still insleep, --

"Let us go. "

"Whither?" I answered, under my breath, so as not to awake her; "is it tosee the child of whom I read, and the land that is blooming out of theearth's childhood?"

"Out of the dark into the light; where the leaves do not change; where thenight 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 couldtell you that my love has not changed in our sorrow, holier and deeperthan on the day in which our vows were exchanged! In you still all myhopes fold their wings; where you are, there still I myself have mydreamland!"

The sweet face grew bright as I spoke; all trouble left the smile; softlyshe drew her hand from my clasp, and rested it for a moment on my bendedhead, as if in blessing. 

I rose; stole back to my own room, closing the door, lest the sob I couldnot stifle should mar her sleep. 

CHAPTER LXVI. 

I unfolded my new prospects to Mrs. Ashleigh. She was more easilyreconciled to them than I could have supposed, judging by her habits, which were naturally indolent, and averse to all that disturbed their eventenor. But the great grief which had befallen her had roused up thatstrength of devotion which lies dormant in all hearts that are capable ofloving another more than self. With her full consent I wrote to Faber, communicating my intentions, instructing him to purchase the property hehad so commended, and inclosing my banker's order for the amount, on anAustralian firm. I now announced my intention to retire from myprofession; 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 sensationwhich the news of my design created. My faults became at once forgotten;such good qualities as I might possess were exaggerated. The publicregret vented and consoled itself in a costly testimonial, to which eventhe poorest of my patients insisted on the privilege to contribute, gracedwith an inscription flattering enough to have served for the epitaph onsome great man's tomb. No one who has served an art and striven for aname is a stoic to the esteem of others; and sweet indeed would suchhonours have been to me had not publicity itself seemed a wrong to thesanctity of that affliction which set Lilian apart from the movement andthe 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 isdue to him now to state that, in his capacity of magistrate, and in hisown way, he had been both active and delicate in the inquiries set on footfor Lilian during the unhappy time in which she had wandered, spellbound, from her home. He, alone, of all the more influential magnates of thetown, had upheld her innocence against the gossips that aspersed it; andduring the last trying year of my residence at L----, he had sought me, with frank and manly confessions of his regret for his former prejudiceagainst me, and assurances of the respect in which he had held me eversince my marriage--marriage but in rite--with Lilian. He had then, strongin his ruling passion, besought me to consult his clairvoyants as to hercase. 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 incredulousdisdain. The fact was, that I had conceived a solemn terror of allpractices 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 ownimagination. He continued not less friendly in spite of my refusal. And, such are the vicissitudes in human feeling, I parted from him whom I hadregarded as my most bigoted foe with a warmer sentiment of kindness thanfor any of those on whom I had counted on friendship. He had not desertedLilian. It was not so with Mrs. Poyntz. I would have paid tenfold thevalue of the testimonial to have erased, from the list of those whosubscribed 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 tocall on her. She wrote in lines so blurred that I could with difficultydecipher them, that she was very ill, given over by Dr. Jones, who hadbeen 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 haddied. Widely different, indeed, the aspect of the walls, the character ofthe furniture! The dingy paperhangings were replaced by airy muslins, showing a rose-coloured ground through their fanciful openwork; luxuriousfauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors, a toilet-table trickedout with lace and ribbons; and glittering with an array of silver gewgawsand jewelled trinkets, --all transformed the sick chamber of the simpleman of science to a boudoir of death for the vain coquette. But the roomitself, in its high lattice and heavy ceiling, was the same--as the coffinitself has the same confines, whether it be rich in velvets and brightwith blazoning, or rude as a pauper's shell. 

And the bed, with its silken coverlet, and its pillows edged with thethread-work of Louvain, stood in the same sharp angle as that over whichhad flickered the frowning smoke-reek above the dying, resentful foe. AsI approached, a man, who was seated beside the sufferer, turned round hisface, 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 frequentlycome into contact wherever the physician resigns to the priest thelanguage that bids man hope. Mr. C-----, as a preacher, was renowned forhis touching eloquence; as a pastor, revered for his benignant piety; asfriend and neighbour, beloved for a sweetness of nature which seemed toregulate all the movements of a mind eminently masculine by the beat of aheart tender as the gentlest woman's. 

This good man; then whispering something to the sufferer which I did notoverhear, stole towards me, took me by the hand, and said, also in awhisper, "Be merciful as Christians are. " He led me to the bedside, thereleft me, went out, and closed the door. 

"Do you think I am really dying, Dr. Fenwick?" said a feeble voice. "Ifear Dr. Jones has misunderstood my case. I wish I had called you in atthe 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 theface sufficed to tell me that death was drawing near. 

Mechanically, however, I went through the hackneyed formulae ofprofessional questions. This vain ceremony done, as gently and delicatelyas 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 whomwe owe the forethought of affection, often relieves the body also of manya gnawing pain, and sometimes, to the surprise of the most experiencedphysician, prolongs life itself. "

"Ah, " said the old maid, peevishly, "I understand! But it is not my willthat troubles me. I should not be left to a nurse from a hospital if myrelations did not know that my annuity dies with me; and I forestalled itin furnishing this house, Dr. Fenwick, and all these pretty things will besold to pay those horrid tradesmen!--very hard!--so hard!--just as I gotthings about me in the way I always said I would have them if I could everafford it! I always said I would have my bedroom hung with muslin, likedear Lady L----'s; and the drawing-room in geranium-coloured silk: sopretty. 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 violentparoxysm, which, when she recovered from it, had produced one of thosestartling changes of mind that are sometimes witnessed beforedeath, --changes whereby the whole character of a life seems to undergosolemn transformation. The hard will becomes gentle, the proud meek, thefrivolous earnest. That awful moment when the things of earth pass awaylike dissolving scenes, leaving death visible on the background by theglare that shoots up in the last flicker of life's lamp. 

And when she lifted her haggard face from my shoulder, and heard mypitying, soothing voice, it was not the grief of a trifler at the loss offondled toys that spoke in the fallen lines of her lip, in the woe of herpleading eyes. 

"So this is death, " she said. "I feel it hurrying on. I must speak. Ipromised Mr. C---- that I would. Forgive me, can you--can you? Thatletter--that letter to Lilian Ashleigh, I wrote it! Oh, do not look at meso terribly; I never thought it could do such evil! And am I not punishedenough? I truly believed when I wrote that Miss Ashleigh was deceivingyou, 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 becomerich unexpectedly; I set my heart on this house--I had always fanciedit--and I thought if I could prevent Miss Ashleigh marrying you, and scareher and her mother from coming back to L----, I could get the house. AndI did get it. What for?--to die. I had not been here a week before I gotthe hurt that is killing me--a fall down the stairs, --coming out of thisvery room; the stairs had been polished. If I had stayed in my oldlodging, it would not have happened. Oh, say you forgive me! Say, sayit, even if you do not feel you can! Say it!" And the miserable womangrasped me by the arm as Dr. Lloyd had grasped me. 

I shaded my averted face with my hands; my heart heaved with the agony ofmy suppressed passion. A wrong, however deep, only to myself, I couldhave pardoned without effort; such a wrong to Lilian, --no! I could notsay "I forgive. "

The dying wretch was perhaps more appalled by my silence than she wouldhave 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. Haveyou never wronged another? Has the Evil One never tempted you?"

Then I spoke in broken accents: "Me! Oh, had it been I whom youdefamed--but a young creature so harmless, so unoffending, and for somiserable a motive!"

"But I tell you, I swear to you, I never dreamed I could cause suchsorrow; 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. Imet 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, andwas gone away;' and he laughed again. And I thought be knew more than hewould tell me, so I asked him if he supposed Mrs. Ashleigh would comeback, 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 theyoung ones are hurt, ' and went away singing. When I got home, his laughand his song haunted me. I thought I saw him still in my room, promptingme to write, and I sat down and wrote. Oh, pardon, pardon me! I havebeen a foolish poor creature, but never meant to do such harm. The EvilOne tempted me! There he is, near me now! I see him yonder! there, atthe doorway. He comes to claim me! As you hope for mercy yourself, freeme from him! Forgive me!"

I made an effort over myself. In naming Margrave as her tempter, thewoman 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, stillthe woman was human--fellow-creature-like myself;--but he?

I took the pale hand that still pressed my arm, and said, with firmvoice, --

"Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my wife, I forgive you for her andfor me as freely and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against whoseprecepts the best of us daily sin, to forgive--we children of wrath--toforgive one another!"

"Heaven bless you!--oh, bless you!" she murmured, sinking back upon herpillow. 

"Ah!" thought I, "what if the pardon I grant for a wrong far deeper than Iinflicted on him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber, should indeedbe received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips of the dying annulthe dark curse that the dead has left on my path through the Valley of theShadow!"

I left my patient sleeping quietly, --the sleep that precedes the last. AsI went down the stairs into the hall, I saw Mrs. Poyntz standing at thethreshold, 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 sleepinto which she has fallen. "

"Allen Fenwick, I must speak with you--nay, but for a few minutes. I hearthat you leave L---- to-morrow. It is scarcely among the chances of lifethat we should meet again. " While thus saying, she drew me along the lawndown the path that led towards her own home. "I wish, " said she, earnestly, "that you could part with a kindlier feeling towards me; but Ican scarcely expect it. Could I put myself in your place, and be moved byyour feelings, I know that I should be implacable; but I--"

"But you, madam, are The World! and the World governs itself, anddictates to others, by laws which seem harsh to those who ask from itsfavour the services which the World cannot tender, for the World admitsfavourites, but ignores friends. You did but act to me as the World everacts to those who mistake its favour for its friendship. "

"It is true, " said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candour; and we continued towalk on silently. At length she said abruptly, "But do you not rashlydeprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heartsuffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind?Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed; youdesert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from thefame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself, anddream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the life ofa herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent, for youare untrue to your mind!"

"I am sick of the word 'mind'!" said I, bitterly. And therewith Irelapsed into musing. 

The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl Bookof Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice ofthought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward sense;for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in our humanorganization which the colleges that record them rather guess at thansolve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by thehand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives themost commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallowas ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of poets, hadsufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the uses forwhich I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as great as heavenever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as mine against theshaft that bad lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed, been preparing myreason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, asthose by which tales round the winter fireside scare the credulous child, a contrivance--so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day passes but what somehearth is vexed by an anonymous libel--had wrought a calamity more dreadthan aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-Land unpierced byPhilosophy could trace to the prompting of malignant witchcraft. So, everthis truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon--through theuniform records of what wonder accredits and science rejects as thesupernatural--lo! the dread machinery whose wheels roll through Hades!What need such awful engines for such mean results? The first blockheadwe meet in our walk to our grocer's can tell us more than the ghost tellsus; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts us more than the demon. Howtrue an interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth! The Fiend comes toFaust, the tired seeker of knowledge; Heaven and Hell stake their cause inthe Mortal's temptation. And what does the Fiend to astonish the Mortal?Turn wine into fire, turn love into crime. We need no Mephistopheles toaccomplish these marvels every day!

Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman; andwhen 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, turningabruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing by her sidein the scene where a new sense of being had first disclosed to my sightthe hues with which Love, the passionate beautifier, turns into purple andgold the gray of the common air. Thus, when romance has ended in sorrow, and the Beautiful fades from the landscape, the trite and positive formsof life, banished for a time, reappear, and deepen our mournfulremembrance 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 ofmyself, began to speak, in her habitual clear, ringing accents, of her ownsocial schemes and devices, --

"I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fenwick; for though, during thelast year or so, all actual intercourse between us has ceased, yet myinterest in you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I satalone, --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 thefuture, or for whom I could form a project. It is so wearisome to countthe changes which pass within us, that we take interest in the changesthat pass without. Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no longermy Jane. "

"I cannot linger with you on this spot, " said I, impatiently turning backinto the path; she followed, treading over fallen leaves. And unheedingmy interruption, she thus continued her hard talk, --

"But I am not sick of my mind, as you seem to be of yours; I am onlysomewhat tired of the little cage in which, since it has been alone, itruffles its plumes against the flimsy wires that confine it from widerspace. 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 toattend regularly and work hard, but he does not like Jane to go into theworld by herself, and he wishes her to go into the world, because he wantsa wife to display his wealth for the improvement of his position. InAshleigh Sumner's house I shall have ample scope for my energies, such asthey are. I have a curiosity to see the few that perch on the wheels ofthe State and say, 'It is we who move the wheels!' It will amuse me tolearn if I can maintain in a capital the authority I have won in a countrytown; if not, I can but return to my small principality. Wherever I liveI must sway, not serve. If I succeed--as I ought, for in Jane's beautyand Ashleigh's fortune I have materials for the woof of ambition, wantingwhich here, I fall asleep over my knitting--if I succeed, there will beenough 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 andmaintained 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 tothink that the heart may be void when the mind is full. Confess you envyme while you listen. "

"Not so; all that to you seems so great appears to me so small! Naturealone is always grand, in her terrors as well as her charms. The Worldfor you, Nature for me. Farewell!"

"Nature!" said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately. "Poor Allen Fenwick! Natureindeed, --intellectual suicide! Nay, shake hands, then, if for the lasttime. "

So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-gate and the stone stairsseparated my blighted fairy-land from the common thoroughfare. 

CHAPTER LXVIII. 

That night as I was employed in collecting the books and manuscripts whichI proposed to take with me, including my long-suspended physiologicalwork, and such standard authorities as I might want to consult or refer toin the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered to inform me, inanswer to the inquiries I had sent him to make, that Miss Brabazon hadpeacefully breathed her last an hour before. Well! my pardon had perhapssoothed her last moments; but how unavailing her death-bed repentance toundo the wrong she had done!

I turned from that thought, and, glancing at the work into which I hadthrown all my learning, methodized into system with all my art, I recalledthe pity which Mrs. Poyntz had expressed for my meditated waste of mind. The tone of superiority which this incarnation of common-sense accompaniedby uncommon will assumed over all that was too deep or too high for hercomprehension had sometimes amused me; thinking over it now, it piqued. Isaid to myself, "After all, I shall bear with me such solace asintellectual occupation can afford. I shall have leisure to complete thislabour; and a record that I have lived and thought may outlast all thehonours which worldly ambition may bestow upon Ashleigh Summer!" And, asI so murmured, my hand, mechanically selecting the books I needed, fell onthe Bible that Julius Faber had given to me. 

It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our Church places amongstthe Apocrypha, and is generally considered by scholars to have beenwritten in the first or second century of the Christian era, [1]--but inwhich the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to which we cantrace back his desire "to comprehend the ways of the Most High, " areinvested with a grandeur of thought and sublimity of word to which I knowof no parallel in writers we call profane. 

My eye fell on this passage in the lofty argument between the Angel whosename was Uriel, and the Prophet, perplexed by his own cravings forknowledge:--

 "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 thatthe author was contemporary, and, indeed, identical, with the author ofthe Book of Enoch. 

CHAPTER LXIX. 

I had hoped that the voyage would produce some beneficial effect uponLilian; but no effect, good or bad, was perceptible, except, perhaps, adeeper silence, a gentler calm. She loved to sit on the deck when thenights were fair, and the stars mirrored on the deep. And once thus, as Istood beside her, bending over the rail of the vessel, and gazing on thelong wake of light which the moon made amidst the darkness of an ocean towhich no shore could be seen, I said to myself, "Where is my track oflight through the measureless future? Would that I could believe as I didwhen a child! Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from my knowledgeshould lead me away from the comfort which the peasant who mourns finds infaith! Why should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me, --me, no fondchild of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools the severest? Yet whatmarvel--the strangest my senses have witnessed or feigned in the fraudthey 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 lifeprearranged by my hopes and confirmed by my judgment? How calmly before Iknew love I have anatomized its mechanism, as the tyro who dissects theweb-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. Canlove be reduced to the realm of the senses? No; what nun is more barredby her grate from the realm of the senses than my bride by her solemnaffliction? 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 mindis to her a sealed fountain. Yet I love her more--oh, ineffablymore!--for the doom which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns tolove--in the form, in the mind! How can I now, in my vain physiology, saywhat is love, what is not? Is it love which must tell me that man has asoul, and that in soul will be found the solution of problems never to besolved 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 humanraces!"""Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see, waveflows 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 hadmysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But drawing hernearer towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of light, dividing the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the slopinghorizon. 

CHAPTER LXX. 

The voyage is over. At the seaport at which we landed I found a letterfrom Faber. My instructions had reached him in time to effect thepurchase on which his descriptions had fixed my desire. The stock, theimplements of husbandry, the furniture of the house, were included in thepurchase. All was prepared for my arrival, and I hastened from the thenmiserable village, which may some day rise into one of the mightiestcapitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness. 

It was the burst of the Australian spring, which commences in our autumnmonth of October. The air was loaded with the perfume of the acacias. Amidst the glades of the open forest land, or climbing the craggy banksof winding silvery creeks, [1] creepers and flowers of dazzling huecontrasted the olive-green of the surrounding foliage. The exhilaratingeffect of the climate in that season heightens the charm of the strangescenery. In the brilliancy of the sky, in the lightness of theatmosphere, the sense of life is wondrously quickened. With the verybreath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air, he feels as ifinhaling hope. 

We have reached our home, we are settled in it; the early unfamiliarimpressions are worn away. We have learned to dispense with much that weat first missed, and are reconciled to much that at first disappointed ordispleased. 

The house is built but of logs; the late proprietor had commenced, upon arising ground, a mile distant, a more imposing edifice of stone, but it isnot 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 thegrape-vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to thegable roof. There is a large garden in front, in which many Englishfruit-trees have been set, and grow fast amongst the plants of the tropicsand the orange-trees of Southern Europe. Beyond stretch undulouspastures, studded not only with sheep, but with herds of cattle, which myspeculative predecessor had bred from parents of famous stock, andimported from England at mighty cost; but as yet the herds had been oflittle profit, and they range their luxuriant expanse of pasture with aslittle 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 itsopposite bank a forest opens, through frequent breaks, into park-likeglades and alleys. The territory, of which I so suddenly find myself thelord, is vast, even for a colonial capitalist. 

It had been originally purchased as "a special survey, " comprising twentythousand acres, with the privilege of pasture over forty thousand more. In very little of this land, though it includes some of the most fertiledistricts in the known world, has cultivation been even commenced. At thetime I entered into possession, even sheep were barely profitable; labourwas scarce and costly. Regarded as a speculation, I could not wonder thatmy predecessor fled in fear from his domain. Had I invested the bulk ofmy capital in this lordly purchase, I should have deemed myself a ruinedman; but a villa near London, with a hundred acres, would have cost me asmuch to buy, and thrice as much to keep up. I could afford the investmentI had made. I found a Scotch bailiff already on the estate, and I wascontented to escape from rural occupations, to which I brought noexperience, by making it worth his while to serve me with zeal. Twodomestics 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 sameas in our native home. Lilian was not subjected to the ordinaryprivations and discomforts that await the wife even of the wealthyemigrant. Alas! would she have heeded them if she had been?

The change of scene wrought a decided change for the better in her healthand spirits, but not such as implied a dawn of reviving reason. But hercountenance was now more rarely overcast. Its usual aspect was glad witha soft mysterious smile. She would murmur snatches of songs, that werepartly borrowed from English poets, and partly glided away into whatseemed spontaneous additions of her own, --wanting intelligible meaning, but never melody nor rhyme. Strange, that memory and imitation--the twoearliest parents of all inventive knowledge--should still be so active, and judgment--the after faculty, that combines the rest into purpose andmethod-be annulled!

Julius Faber I see continually, though his residence is a few milesdistant. He is sanguine as to Lilian's ultimate recovery; and, to myamazement and to my envy, he has contrived, by some art which I cannotattain, to establish between her and himself intelligible communion. Shecomprehends his questions, when mine, though the simplest, seem to her inunknown language; and he construes into sense her words, that to me aremeaningless riddles. 

"I was right, " he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the gardenbeside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay--listless yetfretful--under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks andfields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from whichthe arch of the horizon seemed to spring, --"I was right, " said the greatphysician; "this is reason suspended, not reason lost. Your wife willrecover; but--"

"But what?"

"Give me your arm as I walk homeward, and I will tell you the conclusionto which I have come. "

I rose, the old man leaned on me, and we went down the valley along thecraggy ridges of the winding creek. The woodland on the opposite bank wasvocal with the chirp and croak and chatter of Australian birds, --allmirthful, all songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which some earlyirreverent emigrant degraded to the name of magpie, but whose note issweeter than the nightingale's, and trills through the lucent air with adistinct ecstatic melody of joy that dominates all the discords, soravishing the sense, that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds thescream of the parrots. 

[1] Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious waterCourses and tributary streams. 

CHAPTER LXXI. 

"You may remember, " said Julius Faber, "Sir Humphry Davy's eloquentdescription of the effect produced on him by the inhalation of nitrousoxide. He states that he began to lose the perception of external things;trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through his mind, and wereconnected with words in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectlynovel. 'I existed, ' he said, 'in a world of newly-connected andnewly-modified ideas. ' When he recovered, he exclaimed: 'Nothing existsbut thoughts; the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains!'

"Now observe, that thus a cultivator of positive science, endowed with oneof the healthiest of human brains, is, by the inhalation of a gas, abstracted from all external life, --enters into a new world, whichconsists of images he himself creates and animates so vividly that, onwaking, he resolves the universe itself into thoughts. "

"Well, " said I, "but what inference do you draw from that voluntaryexperiment, applicable to the malady of which you bid me hope the cure?"

"Simply this: that the effect produced on a healthful brain by the nitrousoxide may be produced also by moral causes operating on the blood, or onthe nerves. There is a degree of mental excitement in which ideas aremore vivid than sensations, and then the world of external things givesway to the world within the brain. [1] But this, though a suspension ofthat reason which comprehends accuracy of judgment, is no more a permanentaberration of reason than were Sir Humphry Davy's visionary ecstasiesunder the influence of the gas. The difference between the two states ofsuspension is that of time, and it is but an affair of time with ourbeloved patient. Yet prepare yourself. I fear that the mind will notrecover without some critical malady of the body!"

"Critical! but not dangerous?--say not dangerous! I can endure thepause of her reason; I could not endure the void in the universe if herlife 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 donot 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 thanmere mind? Yet surely it cannot be the mere body? What is it, if notthat continuance of being which your philosophy declines toacknowledge, --namely, soul? If you fear so painfully that your Lilianshould die, is it not that you fear to lose her forever?"

"Oh, cease, cease!" I cried impatiently. "I cannot now argue onmetaphysics. What is it that you anticipate of harm to her life? Herhealth has been stronger ever since her affliction. She never seems toknow ailment now. Do you not perceive that her cheek has a more hardybloom, her frame a more rounded symmetry, than when you saw her inEngland?"

"Unquestionably. Her physical forces have been silently recruitingthemselves in the dreams which half lull, half amuse her imagination. Imagination! that faculty, the most glorious which is bestowed on thehuman mind, because it is the faculty which enables thought to create, isof all others the most exhausting to life when unduly stimulated andconsciously reasoning on its own creations. I think it probable that hadthis sorrow not befallen you, you would have known a sorrow yetgraver, --you would have long survived your Lilian. As it is now, when sherecovers, her whole organization, physical and mental, will have undergonea beneficent change. But, I repeat my prediction, --some severe malady ofthe body will precede the restoration of the mind; and it is my hope thatthe present suspense or aberration of the more wearing powers of the mindmay fit the body to endure and surmount the physical crisis. I remember acase, within my own professional experience, in many respects similar tothis, but in other respects it was less hopeful. I was consulted by ayoung student of a very delicate physical frame, of great mental energies, and consumed by an intense ambition. He was reading for universityhonours. 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 hetoiled, and equally certain to die a few months after obtaining it. Hefalsified both my prognostics. He so overworked himself that, on the dayof examination, his nerves were agitated, his memory failed him; hepassed, not without a certain credit, but fell far short of the rankamongst his fellow competitors to which he aspired. Here, then, theirritated mind acted on the disappointed heart, and raised a new train ofemotions. He was first visited by spectral illusions; then he sank into astate in which the external world seemed quite blotted out. He heedednothing that was said to him; seemed to see nothing that was placed beforehis eyes, --in a word, sensations became dormant, ideas preconceivedusurped their place, and those ideas gave him pleasure. He believed thathis genius was recognized, and lived amongst its supposed creationsenjoying an imaginary fame. So it went on for two years, during whichsuspense of his reason, his frail form became robust and vigorous. At theend of that time he was seized with a fever, which would have swept him inthree days to the grave had it occurred when I was first called in toattend him. He conquered the fever, and, in recovering, acquired the fullpossession of the intellectual faculties so long suspended. When I lastsaw him, many years afterwards, he was in perfect health, and the objectof his young ambition was realized; the body had supported the mind, --hehad achieved distinction. Now what had so, for a time, laid this strongintellect into visionary sleep? The most agonizing of human emotions in anoble spirit, --shame! What has so stricken down your Lilian? You havetold me the story: shame!--the shame of a nature pre-eminently pure. Butobserve that, in his case as in hers, the shock inflicted does not producea succession of painful illusions: on the contrary, in both, the illusionsare generally pleasing. Had the illusions been painful, the body wouldhave suffered, the patient died. Why did a painful shock produce pleasingillusions? Because, no matter how a shock on the nerves may originate, ifit affects the reason, it does but make more vivid than impressions fromactual external objects the ideas previously most cherished. Such ideasin the young student were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas in the youngmaiden are ideas of angel comforters and heavenly Edens. You miss hermind on the earth, and, while we speak, it is in paradise. "

"Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the speculations of greatwriters, with whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those writers, norin your encouraging words, do I find a solution for much that has noprecedents in my experience, --much, indeed, that has analogies in myreading, but analogies which I have hitherto despised as old wives'fables. I have bared to your searching eye the weird mysteries of mylife. How do you account for facts which you cannot resolve intoillusions, --for the influence which that strange being, Margrave, exercised over Lilian's mind or fancy, so that for a time her love for mewas as dormant as is her reason now; so that he could draw her--her whosenature 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 mindwas without a care and my health without a flaw, --how account for allthis: as you endeavoured, and perhaps successfully, to account for all myimpressions of the Vision in the Museum, of the luminous, haunting shadowin its earlier apparitions, when my fancy was heated, my heart tormented, and, it might be, even the physical forces of this strong framedisordered?"

"Allen, " said the old pathologist, "here we approach a ground which fewphysicians have dared to examine. Honour to those who, like our boldcontemporary, Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in seekingto extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by experiment, from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to found aphilosophy, and to which philosophy tracks the origin of magic. "

"What! do I understand you? Is it you, Julius Faber, who attach faith tothe wonders attributed to animal magnetism and electro-biology, orsubscribe to the doctrines which their practitioners teach?"

"I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen with my own eyes thewonders recorded, upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to permitme peremptorily to deny what I have not witnessed. [2] But wherever I lookthrough the History of Mankind in all ages and all races, I find aconcurrence in certain beliefs which seem to countenance the theory thatthere is in some peculiar and rare temperaments a power over forms ofanimated organization, with which they establish some unaccountableaffinity; and even, though much more rarely, a power over inanimatematter. You are familiar with the theory of Descartes, 'that thoseparticles of the blood which penetrate to the brain do not only serve tonourish and sustain its substance, but to produce there a certain verysubtle Aura, or rather a flame very vivid and pure, that obtains the nameof the Animal Spirits;'[3] and at the close of his great fragment uponMan, he asserts that 'this flame is of no other nature than all the fireswhich are in inanimate bodies. '[4] This notion does but forestall themore recent doctrine that electricity is more or less in all, or nearlyall, known matter. Now, whether in the electric fluid or some other fluidakin to it of which we know still less, thus equally pervading all matter, there may be a certain magnetic property more active, more operative uponsympathy in some human constitutions than in others, and which can accountfor the mysterious power I have spoken of, is a query I might suggest, butnot an opinion I would hazard. For an opinion I must have that basis ofexperience or authority which I do not need when I submit a query to theexperience and authority of others. Still, the supposition conveyed inthe query is so far worthy of notice, that the ecstatic temperament (inwhich phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is peculiarlysensitive to electric atmospheric influences. This is a fact which mostmedical observers will have remarked in the range of their practice. Accordingly, I was prepared to find Mr Hare Townshend, in his interestingwork, [5] state that he himself was of 'the electric temperament, ' sparksflying from his hair when combed in the dark, etc. That accomplishedwriter, whose veracity no one would impugn, affirms that between thiselectrical endowment and whatever mesmeric properties he might possess, there is a remarkable relationship and parallelism. Whatever state of theatmosphere tends to accumulate and insulate electricity in the body, promotes equally' (says Mr. Townshend) 'the power and facility with whichI influence others mesmerically. ' What Mr. Townshend thus observes inhimself, American physicians and professors of chemistry depose to haveobserved in those modern magicians, the mediums of (so-called) 'spiritmanifestation. ' They state that all such mediums are of the electrictemperament, thus everywhere found allied with the ecstatic, and theirpower varies in proportion as the state of the atmosphere serves todepress or augment the electricity stored in themselves. Here, then, inthe midst of vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as altogetherthe tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted assupernatural portents-here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may, perhaps, find a starting point, from which inductive experiment mayarrive, soon or late, at a rational theory. But however the power ofwhich we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament)may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I ampersuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is notwholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft. Itis well said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjectswith the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, 'that ifmagic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign wouldnever have endured so long; but that its art took its origin in singularphenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested inthe conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the principle of which was atfirst unknown, served to root faith in magic, and often abused evenenlightened minds. The enchanters and magicians arrived, by diverspractices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a determined orderof dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of inducing fits ofhypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so affected imaginedthat they saw, heard, touched, supernatural beings, conversed with them, proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which magic proclaimeditself to possess the secret. The public, the enchanters, and theenchanted were equally dupes. '[6] Accepting this explanation, unintelligible to no physician of a practice so lengthened as mine hasbeen, I draw from it the corollary, that as these phenomena are exhibitedonly by certain special affections, to which only certain specialconstitutions are susceptible, so not in any superior faculties ofintellect, or of spiritual endowment, but in peculiar physicaltemperaments, often strangely disordered, the power of the sorcerer inaffecting the imagination of others is to be sought. In the native tribesof Australasia the elders are instructed in the arts of this so-calledsorcery, but only in a very few constitutions does instruction avail toproduce 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 anunquestionable 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 theLaplanders, of whom Tornoeus reports that of those instructed in themagical art 'only a few are capable of it. ' 'Some, ' he says, 'arenaturally magicians. ' And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by themystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born amagician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, thoughdeveloped by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practiceshould principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fadeinto insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may beaccounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination. In thecruder states of social life not only is imagination more frequentlypredominant over all other faculties, but it has not the healthful ventswhich the intellectual competition of cities and civilization affords. The man who in a savage tribe, or in the dark feudal ages, would be amagician, is in our century a poet, an orator, a daring speculator, aninventive philosopher. In other words, his imagination is drawn topursuits congenial to those amongst whom it works. It is the tendency ofall intellect to follow the directions of the public opinion amidst whichit is trained. Where a magician is held in reverence or awe, there willbe more practitioners of magic than where a magician is despised as animpostor or shut up as a lunatic. In Scandinavia, before the introductionof Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful powers of the Vala, or witch, who was then held in reverence and honour. Christianity wasintroduced, and the early Church denounced the Vala as the instrument ofSatan, and from that moment down dropped the majestic prophetess into amiserable 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 ofpure hypothesis. But this magic, after all, then, you would place in theimagination of the operator, acting on the imagination of those whom itaffects? Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for herewe get back into the legitimate realm of physiology. "

"And possibly, " said Faber, "we may find hints to guide us to usefulexamination, if not to complete solution of problems that, oncedemonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value, --hints, I say, intwo writers of widely opposite genius, Van Helmont and Bacon. VanHelmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his manyextravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to thedisciplined reasoners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which hecalls Fantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination, --is invested withthe power of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses, eachidea clothed in a form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming anoperative entity. This notion is so far favoured by modern physiologists, that Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was extirpated; yet theextirpation was followed by the appearance of luminous figures before theorbit. And again, a woman, stone-blind, complained of 'luminous images, with pale colours, before her eyes. ' Abercrombie mentions the case 'of alady quite blind, her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who neverwalked out without seeing a little old woman in a red cloak, who seemed towalk before her. '[7] Your favourite authority, the illustrious Miller, who was himself in the habit of 'seeing different images in the field ofvision when he lay quietly down to sleep, asserts that these images arenot merely presented to the fancy, but that even the images of dreams arereally seen, ' and that 'any one may satisfy himself of this by accustominghimself regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream, --the imagesseen in the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed todisappear gradually. ' He confirms this statement not only by the resultof his own experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza, and theyet higher authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral appearance asthe internal action of the sense of vision. [8] And this opinion isfavoured by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads him to suggest'that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly asexternal objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis ofvision as if they had been formed by the agency of light. ' Be this as itmay, one fact remains, --that images can be seen even by the blind asdistinctly and vividly as you and I now see the stream below our feet andthe opossums at play upon yonder boughs. Let us come next to someremarkable suggestions of Lord Bacon. In his Natural History, treating ofthe force of the imagination, and the help it receives 'by one man workingby 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 apretended 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 astronger, so that he could think of no other card. ' You see this sageanticipated our modern electro-biologists! And the learned man thenshrewdly asked Lord Bacon, 'Did the juggler tell the card to the manhimself who had thought of it, or bid another tell it?' 'He bade anothertell it, ' answered Lord Bacon. 'I thought so, ' returned his learnedacquaintance, 'for the juggler himself could not have put on so strong animagination; but by telling the card to the other, who believed thejuggler was some strange man who could do strange things, that other mancaught 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 themysteries that branch out of mesmerism or (so-called) spiritualmanifestation, for he would not pretend to despise their phenomena forfear of hurting his reputation for good sense. Bacon then goes on tostate 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, meansto repeat and refresh it. ' For the second and the third he refers to thepractices of magic, and proceeds afterwards to state on what thingsimagination has most force, --'upon things that have the lightest andeasiest motions, and, therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men, and, in them, on such affections as move lightest, --in love, in fear, inirresolution. And, ' adds Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spiritfrom that which dictates to the sages of our time the philosophy ofrejecting without trial that which belongs to the Marvellous, --'andwhatsoever is of this kind, should be thoroughly inquired into. ' And thisgreat founder or renovator of the sober inductive system of investigationeven so far leaves it a matter of speculative inquiry, whether imaginationmay not be so powerful that it can actually operate upon a plant, that hesays: 'This likewise should be made upon plants, and that diligently; asif you should tell a man that such a tree would die this year, and willhim, at these and these times, to go unto it and see how it thriveth. ' Ipresume that no philosopher has followed such recommendations: had somegreat philosopher done so, possibly we should by this time know all thesecrets of what is popularly called witchcraft. "

And as Faber here paused, there came a strange laugh from thefantastic she-oak-tree overhanging the stream, --a wild, impish laugh. 

"Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the laughing-bird of theAustralian bush, " said Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitiousalarm. 

We walked on for some minutes in musing silence, and the rude log-hut inwhich my wise companion had his home came in view, --the flocks grazing onundulous pastures, the lone drinking at a watercourse fringed by theslender gum-trees, and a few fields, laboriously won from the luxuriantgrassland, rippling with the wave of corn. 

I halted, and said, "Rest here for a few moments, till I gather up theconclusions to which your speculative reasoning seems to invite me. "

We sat down on a rocky crag, half mantled by luxuriant creepers withvermilion buds. 

"From the guesses, " said I, "which you have drawn from the erudition ofothers and your own ingenious and reflective inductions, I collect thissolution of the mysteries, by which the experience I gain from my sensesconfounds all the dogmas approved by my judgment. To the rationalconjectures by which, when we first conversed on the marvels thatperplexed me, you ascribe to my imagination, predisposed by mentalexcitement, physical fatigue or derangement, and a concurrence of singularevents tending to strengthen such predisposition, the phantasmalimpressions produced on my senses, --to these conjectures you now add a newone, more startling and less admitted by sober physiologists. Youconceive it possible that persons endowed with a rare and peculiartemperament can so operate on imagination, and, through the imagination, on the senses of others, as to exceed even the powers ascribed to thepractitioners of mesmerism' and electro-biology, and give a certainfoundation of truth to the old tales of magic and witchcraft. You implythat Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence heunquestionably exercised over Lilian, and over, perhaps, less innocentagents, charmed or impelled by his will. And not discarding, as I own Ishould have been originally induced to do, the queries or suggestionsadventured by Bacon in his discursive speculations on Nature, to wit, 'that there be many things, some of them inanimate, that operate upon thespirits of men by secret sympathy and antipathy, ' and to which Bacon gavethe quaint name of 'imaginants, ' so even that wand, of which I havedescribed to you the magic-like effects, may have had propertiescommunicated to it by which it performs the work of the magician, asmesmerists pretend that some substance mesmerized by them can act on thepatient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer himself. Do I state yoursuppositions correctly?"

"Yes; always remembering that they are only suppositions, and volunteeredwith the utmost diffidence. But since, thus seated in the earlywilderness, we permit ourselves the indulgence of childlike guess, may itnot be possible, apart from the doubtful question whether a man cancommunicate to an inanimate material substance a power to act upon themind or imagination of another man--may it not, I say, be possible thatsuch a substance may contain in itself such a virtue or property potentover certain constitutions, though not over all. For instance, it is inmy experience that the common hazel-wood will strongly affect some nervoustemperaments, though wholly without effect on others. I remember a younggirl, who having taken up a hazel-stick freshly cut, could not relax herhold of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force, wasirresistibly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and, afterholding it a few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance, in which shebeheld phantasmal visions. Mentioning this curious case, which I supposedunique, to a learned brother of our profession, he told me that he hadknown other instances of the effect of the hazel upon nervous temperamentsin persons of both sexes. Possibly it was some such peculiar property inthe 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 oracularPythian Apollo. Now wherever, in the old world, we find that the learningof the priests enabled them to exhibit exceptional phenomena, whichimposed upon popular credulity, there was a something or other which isworth a philosopher's while to explore; and, accordingly, I alwayssuspected that there was in the laurel some property favourable toecstatic vision in highly impressionable temperaments. My suspicion, a fewyears ago, was justified by the experience of a German physician, who had under his care a cataleptic or ecstatic patient, and whoassured me that he found nothing in this patient so stimulated the stateof 'sleep-waking, ' or so disposed that state to indulge in thehallucinations of prevision, as the berry of the laurel. [10] Well, we donot know what this wand that produced a seemingly magical effect upon youwas really composed of. You did not notice the metal employed in thewire, which you say communicated a thrill to the sensitive nerves in thepalm of the hand. You cannot tell how far it might have been the vehicleof some fluid force in nature. Or still more probably, whether the poresof your hand insensibly imbibed, and communicated to the brain, some ofthose powerful narcotics from which the Buddhists and the Arabs makeunguents that induce visionary hallucinations, and in which substancesundetected 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 theancients, and especially in the East, the construction of wands formagical purposes was no commonplace mechanical craft, but a special andsecret art appropriated to men who cultivated with assiduity all that wasthen known of natural science in order to extract from it agencies thatmight appear supernatural. Possibly, then, the rods or wands of the East, of which Scripture makes mention, were framed upon some principles ofwhich we in our day are very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransackscience for the same secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation ofthe material employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible tonatural philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, ordivination and enchantment by wands. The staff, or wand, of which youtell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hithertoscientifically analyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptionaltemperaments, which may account for the fact that iron and crystal havebeen favourites with all professed mystics, ancient and modern. TheDelphic Pythoness had her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and manypersons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball of crystal butwhat they begin to see visions. I suspect that a philosophical cause forsuch seemingly preternatural effects of crystal and iron will be found inconnection with the extreme impressionability to changes in temperatureswhich is the characteristic both of crystal and iron. But if thesematerials do contain certain powers over exceptional constitutions, we donot arrive at a supernatural but at a natural phenomenon. "

"Still, " said I, "even granting that your explanatory hypotheses hit orapproach the truth;--still what a terrible power you would assign to man'swill over men's reason and deeds!"

"Man's will, " answered Faber, "has over men's deeds and reason, habitualand daily, power infinitely greater and, when uncounterbalanced, infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates inmagic. Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind itcalamities little less dire than slaughter. Man's will frames, but italso corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion; sets the worldmad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts bythe wisdom of brother-like mercy. You revolt at the exceptional, limitedsway over some two or three individuals which the arts of a sorcerer (ifsorcerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the very moment in which youwere perplexed and appalled by such sway, or by your reluctant belief init, your will was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and wither thehopes of millions!"

"My will! What engine?"

"A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and directedby your will, to steal from the minds of other men their persuasion of thesoul's everlasting Hereafter. "

I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale. 

"And if we accept Bacon's theory of 'secret sympathy, ' or the plainerphysiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidlyimpressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity withsuch influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp youto evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray. Grant thatthe Margrave who still haunts your mind did really, by some occult, sinister magnetism, guide the madman to murder, did influence theservant-woman's vulgar desire to pry into the secrets of her ill-fatedmaster, or the old maid's covetous wish and envious malignity: what couldthis awful magician do more than any commonplace guilty adviser, to a mindpredisposed to accept the advice?"

"You forget one example which destroys your argument, --the spell whichthis mysterious fascinator could cast upon a creature so pure from allguilt 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 itsattraction no sentiment of affection untrue to yourself. Nay, it isjustice to your Lilian, and may be melancholy comfort to you, to state myconviction, based on the answers my questions have drawn from her, thatyou were never more cherished by her love than when that love seemed toforsake you. Her imagination impressed her with the illusion that throughyour love for her you were threatened with a great peril. What seemed thelevity of her desertion was the devotion of self-sacrifice. And, in herstrange, dream-led wanderings, do not think that she was conscious of thefascination you impute to this mysterious Margrave: in her belief it wasyour own guardian angel that guided her steps, and her pilgrimage wasordained to disarm the foe that menaced you, and dissolve the spell thatdivided her life from yours! But had she not, long before this, willinglyprepared herself to be so deceived? Had not her fancies beendeliberately encouraged to dwell remote from the duties we are placed onthe earth to perform? The loftiest faculties in our nature are those thatdemand the finest poise, not to fall from their height and crush all thewalls that they crown. With exquisite beauty of illustration, Hume saysof the dreamers of 'bright fancies, ' 'that they may be compared to thoseangels whom the Scriptures represent as covering their eyes with theirwings. ' Had you been, like my nephew, a wrestler for bread with thewilderness, what helpmate would your Lilian have been to you? How oftenwould you have cried out in justifiable anger, 'I, son of Adam, am onearth, not in Paradise! Oh, that my Eve were at home on my hearth, andnot in the skies with the seraphs!' No Margrave, I venture to say, couldhave suspended the healthful affections, or charmed into danger thewide-awake soul of my Amy. When she rocks in its cradle the babe theyoung 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 theflowers on the stand, or range in neat order the books that I read, nospell on her fancy could lead her a step from the range of her providentcares! At day she is contented to be on the commonplace earth; at eveningshe and I knock together at the one door of heaven, which opes tothanksgiving and prayer; and thanksgiving and prayer send us back, calmand hopeful, to the task that each morrow renews. "

I looked up as the old man paused, and in the limpid clearness of theAustralian atmosphere, I saw the child he thus praised standing by thegarden-gate, looking towards us, and though still distant she seemed near. I felt wroth with her. My heart so cherished my harmless, defencelessLilian, that I was jealous of the praise taken from her to be bestowed onanother. 

"Each of us, " said I, coldly, "has his or her own nature, and the usesharmonious to that nature's idiosyncrasy. The world, I grant, would geton very ill if women were not more or less actively useful and quietlygood, like your Amy. But the world would lose standards that exalt andrefine, if no woman were permitted to gain, through the indulgence offancy, thoughts exquisite as those which my Lilian conceived, whilethought, alas! flowed out of fancy. I do not wound you by citing your Amyas a type of the mediocre; I do not claim for Lilian the rank we accord tothe 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 ofgenius, amidst a thousand mistakes which mediocrity never commits, are tosuggest and perpetuate ideas which raise the standard of the mediocre to anobler 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 erringdreamer of genius!"

"You say well, Allen Fenwick. And who should be so indulgent to thevagaries of the imagination as the philosophers who taught your youth todoubt everything in the Maker's plan of creation which could not bemathematically proved? 'The human mind, ' said Luther, 'is like a drunkardon horseback; prop it on one side, and it falls on the other. ' So the manwho is much too enlightened to believe in a peasant's religion, is alwayssure to set up some insane superstition of his own. Open biographicalvolumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion is aman who has faith in a nightmare. See that type of the elegantsceptics, --Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He is writing a book againstRevelation; he asks a sign from heaven to tell him if his book is approvedby his Maker, and the man who cannot believe in the miracles performed byhis Saviour gravely tells us of a miracle vouchsafed to himself. Take thehardest and strongest intellect which the hardest and strongest race ofmankind ever schooled and accomplished. See the greatest of great men, the great Julius Caesar! Publicly he asserts in the Senate that theimmortality of the soul is a vain chimera. He professes the creed whichRoman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus, and denies all Divineinterference in the affairs of the earth. A great authority for theMaterialists--they have none greater! They can show on their side nointellect equal to Caesar's! And yet this magnificent freethinker, rejecting a soul and a Deity, habitually entered his chariot muttering acharm; crawled on his knees up the steps of a temple to propitiate theabstraction called 'Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon till he hadconsulted the omens. What does all this prove?--a very simple truth. Manhas some instincts with the brutes; for instance, hunger and sexual love. Man has one instinct peculiar to himself, found universally (or withalleged exceptions in savage States so rare, that they do not affect thegeneral 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. Resisthunger as long as you can, and, rather than die of starvation, yourinstinct will make you a cannibal; resist love when youth and nature impelto it, and what pathologist does not track one broad path into madness orcrime? So with the noblest instinct of all. Reject the internalconviction by which the grandest thinkers have sanctioned the hope of thehumblest Christian, and you are servile at once to some faithinconceivably more hard to believe. The imagination will not be withheldfrom its yearnings for vistas beyond the walls of the flesh, and the spanof the present hour. Philosophy itself, in rejecting the healthful creedsby which man finds his safeguards in sober prayer and his guide throughthe wilderness of visionary doubt, invents systems compared to which themysteries of theology are simple. Suppose any man of strong, plainunderstanding had never heard of a Deity like Him whom we Christiansadore, then ask this man which he can the better comprehend in his mind, and accept as a natural faith, --namely, the simple Christianity of hisshepherd 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 themetaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself. This subtle philosopher, not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of matter, --not content, withCondillac, to get rid of spirit or mind, --proceeds to a miracle greaterthan any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being then alive andin the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether. Nay, he confesseshe 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 ofdifferent perceptions or objects united together by certain relations, andsupposed, though falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity andidentity. If any one, upon serious and candid reflection, thinks he has adifferent notion of himself, I must confess I can reason with him nolonger. ' Certainly I would rather believe all the ghost stories uponrecord than believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and apart fromthe perceptions conveyed to me, no matter how, --just as I am distinct andapart from the furniture in my room, no matter whether I found it there orwhether I bought it. If some old cosmogonist asked you to believe thatthe primitive cause of the solar system was not to 'be traced to a DivineIntelligence, but to a nebulosity, originally so diffused that itsexistence can with difficulty be conceived, and that the origin of thepresent system of organized beings equally dispensed with the agency of acreative mind, and could be referred to molecules formed in the water bythe power of attraction, till by modifications of cellular tissue in thegradual lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another aMan, --would you not say this cosmogony could scarce have misled the humanunderstanding even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry? Yet suchare the hypotheses to which the desire to philosophize away that simpleproposition of a Divine First Cause, which every child can comprehend, ledtwo of the greatest geniuses and profoundest reasoners of moderntimes, --La Place and La Marck. [13] Certainly, the more you examine thosearch phantasmagorists, the philosophers who would leave nothing in theuniverse but their own delusions, the more your intellectual pride may behumbled. The wildest phenomena which have startled you are not moreextravagant than the grave explanations which intellectual presumptionadventures on the elements of our own organism and the relations betweenthe world of matter and the world of ideas. "

Here our conversation stopped, for Amy had now joined us, and, looking upto reply, I saw the child's innocent face between me and the furrowed browof the old man. 

[1] See, on the theory elaborated from this principle, Dr. Hibbert'sinteresting and valuable work on the "Philosophy of Apparitions. "

[2] What Faber here says is expressed with more authority by one of themost accomplished metaphysicians of our time (Sir W. Hamilton):

"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing [than dreaming]. Inthis singular state a person performs a regular series of rationalactions, and those frequently of the most difficult and delicate nature;and what is still more marvellous, with a talent to which he could make nopretension when awake. (Cr. Ancillon, Essais Philos. Ii. 161. ) Hismemory and reminiscence supply him with recollections of words and thingswhich, perhaps, never were at his disposal in the ordinary state, --hespeaks more fluently a more refined language. And if we are to creditwhat the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to disbelieve, he hasnot only perception of things through other channels than the commonorgans of sense, but the sphere of his cognition is amplified to an extentfar beyond the limits to which sensible perception is confined. Thissubject 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 bebelieved, and yet, on the other, they are of so unambiguous and palpable acharacter, and the witnesses to their reality are so numerous, sointelligent, and so high above every suspicion of deceit, that it isequally impossible to deny credit to what is attested by such ample and unexceptionable evidence. "--Sir W. Hamilton: Lectures on Metaphysics andLogic, vol. Ii. P. 274. 

This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves thejudgment so equally balanced that it finds it impossible to believe, andyet impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of mind in which acandid thinker should come to the examination of those more extraordinaryphenomena which he has not himself yet witnessed, but the fair inquiryinto which may be tendered to him by persons above the imputation ofquackery and fraud. Muffler, who is not the least determined, as he iscertainly one of the most distinguished, disbelievers of mesmericphenomena, does not appear to have witnessed, or at least to havecarefully examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have seen that even themore extraordinary of those phenomena confirm, rather than contradict, hisown general theories, and may be explained by the sympathies one sense haswith another, --"the laws of reflection through the medium of the brain. "(Physiology of the Senses, p. 1311. ) And again by the maxim "that themental principle, or cause of the mental phenomena, cannot be confined tothe brain, but that it exists in a latent state in every part of theorganism. " (Ibid. , p. 1355. ) The "nerve power, " contended for by Mr. Bain, also may suggest a rational solution of much that has seemedincredible to those physiologists who have not condescended to sift thegenuine phenomena of mesmerism from the imposture to which, in all ages, the phenomena exhibited by what may be called the ecstatic temperamenthave 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 theIntellectual 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 insupport of his proposition, which Faber advances in other words, namely, "the return of the nervous currents exactly on their old track in revivedsensations. "

[9] Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, namely, that themagician requires the interposition of a third imagination between his ownand that of the consulting believer, that any learned adept in (so-called)magic will invariably refuse to exhibit without the presence of a thirdperson. Hence the author of "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magic, " printedat Parisy 1852-53--a book less remarkable for its learning than for theearnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the art ofwhich he records the history--insists much on the necessity of rigidlyobserving Le Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in anenchanter's experiments. 

[10] I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect of laurel-berries onthe Seeress of Prevorst, corresponding with that asserted by Julius Faberin the text. 

[11] See for these unguents the work of M. Maury, before quoted, "La Magicet l'Astrologie, " etc. , p. 417. 

[12] It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances in whichit has been asserted that a savage race has been found without recognitionof a Deity and a future state would bear searching examination. It isset forth, for example, in most of the popular works on Australia, thatthe Australian savages have no notion of a Deity or a Hereafter, that theyonly worship a devil, or evil spirit. This assumption, though made moreperemptorily, and by a greater number of writers than any similar oneregarding other savages, is altogether erroneous, and has no otherfoundation than the ignorance of the writers. The Australian savagesrecognize 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 placeit amongst the stars. --See Strzelecki's Physical Description of New SouthWales. 

[13] See the observations on La Place and La Marck in the Introduction toKirby's "Bridgewater Treatise. "

CHAPTER LXXII. 

I turned back alone. The sun was reddening the summits of the distantmountain-range, but dark clouds, that portended rain, were gatheringbehind my way and deepening the shadows in many a chasm and hollow whichvolcanic fires had wrought on the surface of uplands undulating likediluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell. Iwandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could Iacknowledge in Julius Faber's conjectures any basis for logicalratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empiricalPhilosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severerfaculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance ofyouth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by mostas a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a vehiclefor guesses at various riddles of Nature, without or within us, which arefree to the license of romance, though forbidden to the caution ofscience. But, I--I--know unmistakably my own identity, my own positiveplace in a substantial universe. And beyond that knowledge, what do Iknow? Yet had Faber no ground for his startling parallels between thechimeras of superstition and the alternatives to faith volunteered by themetaphysical 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 theworld, who perhaps never opened his page), --on the theorems of Condillac Ihad built up a system of thought designed to immure the swathed form ofmaterial 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, thewhisper of winds and the gleaming of stars. 

And did not those very theorems, when carried out to their strict andcompleting results by the close reasonings of Hume, resolve my own livingidentity, the one conscious indivisible me, into a bundle of memoriesderived from the senses which had bubbled and duped my experience, andreduce into a phantom, as spectral as that of the Luminous Shadow, thewhole solid frame of creation?

While pondering these questions, the storm whose forewarnings I hadneglected to heed burst forth with all the suddenness peculiar to theAustralian climes. The rains descended like the rushing of floods. Inthe beds of watercourses, which, at noon, seemed dried up and exhausted, the torrents began to swell and to rave; the gray crags around them wereanimated into living waterfalls. I looked round, and the landscape was aschanged as a scene that replaces a scene on the player's stage. I wasaware that I had wandered far from my home, and I knew not what directionI should take to regain it. Close at hand, and raised above the torrentsthat now rushed in many a gully and tributary creek, around and before me, the mouth of a deep cave, overgrown with bushes and creeping flowerstossed wildly to and fro between the rain from above and the spray ofcascades below, offered a shelter from the storm. I entered, --scaringinnumerable flocks of bats striking against me, blinded by the glare ofthe lightning that followed me into the cavern, and hastening to resettlethemselves on the pendants of stalactites, or the jagged buttresses ofprimaeval wall. 

From time to time the lightning darted into the gloom and lingeredamongst its shadows; and I saw, by the flash, that the floors on which Istood were strewed with strange bones, some amongst them the fossilizedrelics of races destroyed by the Deluge. The rain continued for more thantwo hours with unabated violence; then it ceased almost as suddenly as ithad come on, and the lustrous moon of Australia burst from the cloudsshining bright as an English dawn, into the hollows of the cave. And thensimultaneously arose all the choral songs of the wilderness, --creatureswhose voices are heard at night, --the loud whir of the locusts, themusical boom of the bullfrog, the cuckoo note of the morepork, and, mournful amidst all those merrier sounds, the hoot of the owl, through thewizard she-oaks and the pale green of the gum-trees. 

I stepped forth into the open air and gazed, first instinctively on theheavens, next, with more heedful eye, upon the earth. The nature of thesoil bore the evidence of volcanic fires long since extinguished. Justbefore my feet, the rays fell full upon a bright yellow streak in theblock of quartz half imbedded in the soft moist soil. In the midst of allthe solemn thoughts and the intense sorrows which weighed upon heart andmind, that yellow gleam startled the mind into a direction remote fromphilosophy, quickened the heart to a beat that chimed with no householdaffections. Involuntarily I stooped; impulsively I struck the block withthe hatchet, or tomahawk, I carried habitually about me, for the purposeof marking the trees that I wished to clear from the waste of my broaddomain. The quartz was shattered by the stroke, and left disburied itsglittering treasure. My first glance had not deceived me. I, vain seekerafter knowledge, had, at least, discovered gold. I took up the brightmetal--gold! I paused; I looked round; the land that just before hadseemed to me so worthless took the value of Ophir. Its features hadbefore been as unknown to me as the Mountains of the Moon, and now mymemory became wonderfully quickened. I recalled the rough map of mypossessions, the first careless ride round their boundaries. Yes, theland on which I stood--for miles, to the spur of those farthermountains--the land was mine, and, beneath its surface, there was gold! Iclosed my eyes; for some moments visions of boundless wealth, and of theroyal power which such wealth could command, swept athwart my brain. Butmy heart rapidly settled back to its real treasure. "What matters, " Isighed, "all this dross? Could Ophir itself buy back to my Lilian's smileone ray of the light which gave 'glory to the grass and splendour to theflower'?"

So muttering, I flung the gold into the torrent that raged below, and wenton through the moonlight, sorrowing silently, --only thankful for thediscovery that had quickened my reminiscence of the landmarks by which tosteer my way through the wilderness. 

The night was half gone, for even when I had gained the familiar trackthrough the pastures, the swell of the many winding creeks that nowintersected the way obliged me often to retrace my steps; to find, sometimes, the bridge of a felled tree which had been providently leftunremoved over the now foaming torrent, and, more than once, to swimacross the current, in which swimmers less strong or less practised wouldhave been dashed down the falls, where loose logs and torn trees wentclattering and whirling: for I was in danger of life. A band of thesavage natives were stealthily creeping on my track, --the natives in thoseparts 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 myfeet. I had turned, sought to find and to face these dastardly foes; theycontrived to elude me. But when I moved on, my ear, sharpened by danger, heard them moving, too, in my rear. Once only three hideous formssuddenly faced me, springing up from a thicket, all tangled withhoneysuckles and creepers of blue and vermilion. I walked steadily up tothem. They halted a moment or so in suspense; but perhaps they werescared by my stature or awed by my aspect; and the Unfamiliar, thoughHuman, had terror for them, as the Unfamiliar, although but a Shadow, hadhad terror for me. They vanished, and as quickly as if they had creptinto 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 Englishfruit-trees, under the effulgent Australian moon. Just as I was openingthe little gate which gave access from the pastureland into the garden, afigure in white rose up from under light, feathery boughs, and a hand waslaid on my arm. I started; but my surprise was changed into fear when Isaw 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. Otherswent in search of you and came back. I could not sleep, but the rest aresleeping, so I stole down to watch for you. Brother, brother, if any harmchanced 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 indeedprophetic, --'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 solitarymoon now sinking slow behind the verge of the forest. "It comes back tome, " 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? Youare there, and my father, and--and--Oh! that terrible face, those serpenteyes, the dead man's skull! Save me! save me!"

She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her gently back towards thehouse. As we gained the door which she had left open, the starlightshining across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face from mybreast, and cast a hurried fearful look round the shining garden, theninto the dim recess beyond the threshold. 

"It is there--there!--the Shadow that lured me on, whispering that if Ifollowed it I should join my beloved. False, dreadful Shadow! it willfade 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 shiveringform with my dripping garments, all the while my eyes--following thedirection which hers had taken--dwelt on the walls of the nook within thethreshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight. And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of themysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolvedby 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 tookcourage, as I felt Lilian's heart beating against my own. I advanced, Icrossed the threshold, --the Shadow was gone. 

"There is no Shadow here, --no phantom to daunt thee, my life's life, " saidI, bending over Lilian. 

"It has touched me in passing; I feel it--cold, cold, cold!" she answeredfaintly. 

I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck a light, watchedover her. At dawn there was a change in her face, and from that timehealth 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 hadwatched 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 tofail, but in her mind there was evidently at work some slow revolution. Her visionary abstractions were less frequent; when they occurred, lessprolonged. There was no longer in her soft face that celestial serenitywhich spoke her content in her dreams, but often a look of anxiety andtrouble. 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 earlychildhood. More than once she spoke of commonplace incidents and mereacquaintances at L----. At last she seemed to recognize Mrs. Ashleigh asher 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 wasone 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 werehours, sometimes days together, in which my presence was evidently painfulto her. She would become agitated when I stole into her room, make signsto 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 hopesby reminding me of the prediction he had hazarded, --namely, that throughsome malady to the frame the reason would be ultimately restored. 

He said, "Observe! her mind was first roused from its slumber by theaffectionate, unconquered impulse of her heart. You were absent; thestorm alarmed her, she missed you, --feared for you. The love within her, not alienated, though latent, drew her thoughts into definite humantracks. And thus, the words that you tell me she uttered when youappeared before her were words of love, stricken, though as yetirregularly, as the winds strike the harp-strings from chords of awakenedmemory. The same unwonted excitement, together with lengthened exposureto 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 extendedpractice will perhaps allow that their experience more or less tend toconfirm--no records of the singular coincidences between individualimpressions which are produced by sympathy? Now, whether you or yourLilian were first haunted by this Shadow I know not. Perhaps before itappeared to you in the wizard's chamber it had appeared to her by theMonks' Well. Perhaps, as it came to you in the prison, so it lured herthrough the solitudes, associating its illusory guidance with dreams ofyou. And again, when she saw it within your threshold, your fantasy, soabruptly invoked, made you see with the eyes of your Lilian! Does thisdoctrine of sympathy, though by that very mystery you two loved each otherat first, --though, without it, love at first sight were in itself anincredible miracle, --does, I say, this doctrine of sympathy seem to youinadmissible? Then nothing is left for us but to revolve the conjecture Ibefore threw out. Have certain organizations like that of Margrave thepower to impress, through space, the imaginations of those over whom theyhave forced a control? I know not. But if they have, it is notsupernatural; it is but one of those operations in Nature so rare andexceptional, and of which testimony and evidence are so imperfect and soliable to superstitious illusions, that they have not yet been traced--as, if truthful, no doubt they can be, by the patient genius of science--toone of those secondary causes by which the Creator ordains that Natureshall act on Man. "

By degrees I became dissatisfied with my conversations with Faber. Iyearned for explanations; all guesses but bewildered me more. In hisfamily, with one exception, I found no congenial association. His nephewseemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature, --a youngman of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically rightwhere not tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had urged himto 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 thefish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man. The young farmer'syoung wife was somewhat superior to him; she had more refinement of taste, more culture of mind, but, living in his life, she was inevitably levelledto his ends and pursuits; and, next to the babe in the cradle, no objectseemed to her so important as that of guarding the sheep from the scab andthe dingoes. I was amazed to see how quietly a man whose mind was sostored by life and by books as that of Julius Faber--a man who had lovedthe clash of conflicting intellects, and acquired the rewards offame--could accommodate himself to the cabined range of his kinsfolks'half-civilized existence, take interest in their trivial talk, findvarying excitement in the monotonous household of a peasant-like farmer. I could not help saying as much to him once. "My friend, " replied the oldman, "believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, isthat 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 foundan interest, to whose talk I could listen without fatigue, was the childAmy. Simple though she was in language, patient of labour as the mostlaborious, I recognized in her a quiet nobleness of sentiment, whichexalted above the commonplace the acts of her commonplace life. She hadno precocious intellect, no enthusiastic fancies, but she had an exquisiteactivity of heart. It was her heart that animated her sense of duty, andmade duty a sweetness and a joy. She felt to the core the kindness ofthose around her; exaggerated, with the warmth of her gratitude, theclaims which that kindness imposed. Even for the blessing of life, whichshe shared with all creation, she felt as if singled out by the undeservedfavour of the Creator, and thus was filled with religion, because she wasfilled with love. 

My interest in this child was increased and deepened by my saddened andnot wholly unremorseful remembrance of the night on which her sobs hadpierced my ear, --the night from which I secretly dated the mysteriousagencies that had wrenched from their proper field and career both my mindand my life. But a gentler interest endeared her to my thoughts in thepleasure that Lilian felt in her visits, in the affectionate intercoursethat sprang up between the afflicted sufferer and the harmless infant. Often when we failed to comprehend some meaning which Lilian evidentlywished to convey to us--we, her mother and her husband--she was understoodwith as much ease by Amy, the unlettered child, as by Faber, thegray-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 ofthe marvels which sympathy may effect between lover and beloved; yet when, for days together, I cannot succeed in unravelling Lilian's wish or herthought--and her own mother is equally in fault--you or Amy, closetedalone with her for five minutes, comprehend and are comprehended. "

"Allen, " answered Faber, "Amy and I believe in spirit; and she, in whommind is dormant but spirit awake, feels in such belief a sympathy whichshe has not, in that respect, with yourself, nor even with her mother. You seek only through your mind to conjecture hers. Her mother has senseclear enough where habitual experience can guide it, but that sense isconfused, and forsakes her when forced from the regular pathway in whichit 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 intoheaven. We pray. "

"Alas!" said I, half mournfully, half angrily, "when you thus speak ofMind as distinct from Soul, it was only in that Vision which you bid meregard as the illusion of a fancy stimulated by chemical vapours, producing on the brain an effect similar to that of opium or theinhalation of the oxide gas, that I have ever seen the silver spark of theSoul distinct from the light of the Mind. And holding, as I do, that allintellectual ideas are derived from the experiences of the body, whether Iaccept the theory of Locke, or that of Condillac, or that into which theirpropositions reach their final development in the wonderful subtlety ofHume, I cannot detect the immaterial spirit in the materialsubstance, --much less follow its escape from the organic matter in whichthe principle of thought ceases with the principle of life. When themetaphysician, contending for the immortality of the thinking faculty, analyzes Mind, his analysis comprehends the mind of the brute, nay, of theinsect, as well as that of man. Take Reid's definition of Mind, as themost comprehensive which I can at the moment remember: 'By the mind of aman we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, andwills. [1] But this definition only distinguishes the mind of man fromthat of the brute by superiority in the same attributes, and not byattributes denied to the brute. An animal, even an insect, thinks, remembers, reasons, and wills. [1] Few naturalists will now support thedoctrine that all the mental operations of brute or insect are to beexclusively referred to instincts; and, even if they do, the word'instinct' is a very vague word, --loose and large enough to cover an abysswhich our knowledge has not sounded. And, indeed, in proportion as ananimal like the dog becomes cultivated by intercourse, his instincts growweaker, and his ideas formed by experience (namely, his mind), moredeveloped, often to the conquest of the instincts themselves. Hence, withhis usual candour, Dr. Abercrombie--in contending 'that everything mentalceases to exist after death, when we know that everything corporealcontinues to exist, is a gratuitous assumption contrary to every rule ofphilosophical inquiry'--feels compelled, by his reasoning, to admit theprobability 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 toestablish an immaterial principle in the lower animals which in themexhibits 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 withregard to these, we also contend that they are entirely distinct fromanything 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 ifman's mind is immaterial and imperishable, so also is that of the ape andthe 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 mypride. 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 theurbane philosopher and our combative countryman, Henry More, [3] on thisvery subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Descartesinsists on reducing what he calls the soul (l'ame) of brutes into the samekind of machines as man constructs from inorganized matter. The learning, indeed, lavished on the insoluble question involved in the psychology ofthe inferior animals is a proof at least of the all-inquisitive, redundantspirit of man. [4] We have almost a literature in itself devoted toendeavours to interpret the language of brutes. [5] Dupont de Nemours hasdiscovered that dogs talk in vowels, using only two consonants, G, Z, whenthey are angry. He asserts that cats employ the same vowels as dogs; buttheir 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 thesong of the nightingale! One version of that song, by Beckstein, thenaturalist, published in 1840, I remember to have seen. And I heard alady, gifted with a singularly charming voice, chant the mysterious vowelswith so exquisite a pathos, that one could not refuse to believe her whenshe declared that she fully comprehended the bird's meaning, and gave tothe nightingale's warble the tender interpretation of her own woman'sheart. 

"But leaving all such discussions to their proper place amongst theCuriosities of Literature, I come in earnest to the question you have soearnestly raised; and to me the distinction between man and the loweranimals in reference to a spiritual nature designed for a futureexistence, and the mental operations whose uses are bounded to anexistence on earth, seems ineffaceably clear. Whether ideas or evenperceptions be innate or all formed by experience is a speculation formetaphysicians, which, so far as it affects the question of as immaterialprinciple, I am quite willing to lay aside. I can well understand that amaterialist may admit innate ideas in Man, as he must admit them in theinstinct of brutes, tracing them to hereditary predispositions. On theother hand, we know that the most devout believers in our spiritual naturehave insisted, with Locke, in denying any idea, even of the Deity, to beinnate. 

"But here comes my argument. I care not how ideas are formed, --thematerial point is, how are the capacities to receive ideas formed? Theideas may all come from experience, but the capacity to receive the ideasmust be inherent. I take the word 'capacity' as a good plain Englishword, rather than the more technical word 'receptivity, ' employed by Kant. And by capacity I mean the passive power[6] to receive ideas, whether inman or in any living thing by which ideas are received. A man and anelephant is each formed with capacities to receive ideas suited to theseveral places in the universe held by each. 

"The more I look through Nature the more I find that on all varieties oforganized life is carefully bestowed the capacity to receive theimpressions, be they called perceptions or ideas, which are adapted to theuses each creature is intended to derive from them. I find, then, thatMan alone is endowed with the capacity to receive the ideas of a God, ofSoul, of Worship, of a Hereafter. I see no trace of such a capacity inthe inferior races; nor, however their intelligence may be refined byculture, is such capacity ever apparent in them. 

"But wherever capacities to receive impressions are sufficiently generalin any given species of creature to be called universal to that species, and yet not given to another species, then, from all analogy throughoutNature, those capacities are surely designed by Providence for thedistinct use and conservation of the species to which they are given. 

"It is no answer to me to say that the inherent capacities thus bestowedon Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of aDeity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence thatMan must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his own study andobservation. He must build a hut before he can build a Parthenon; he mustbelieve with the savage or the heathen before he can believe with thephilosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his capacities, Man has onlygiven to him, not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means tostrive towards the Perfect. And thus one of the most accomplished ofmodern 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 fromexternal Nature which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I see theevidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal has nocapacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship--simply because theinferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future life, may nottherein preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand even whythat sympathy with each other which we men possess and which constitutesthe great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not possessed by thelesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional degree) evenwhere they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or ants; becausemen are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life tocome, and the bond between the brute ceases here. 

"Now the more, then, we examine the inherent capacities bestoweddistinctly and solely on Man, the more they seem to distinguish him fromthe other races by their comprehension of objects beyond his life uponthis 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 mindaway from the material into the immaterial, --from the present into thefuture. But if Man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, youmust be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in existence whomNature or Providence has condescended to deceive and cheat by capacitiesfor which there are no available objects. How nobly and how truly hasChalmers 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 amind--because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though in alesser degree--but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as soon ashe is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths not neededfor self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to yonder ox andopossum, --namely, the nature of Deity, Soul, Hereafter. And in therecognition of these truths, the Human society, that excels the society ofbeavers, bees, and ants, by perpetual and progressive improvement on thenotions inherited from its progenitors, rests its basis. Thus, in fact, this world is benefited for men by their belief in the next, while thesociety of brutes remains age after age the same. Neither the bee nor thebeaver has, in all probability, improved since the Deluge. 

"But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse ofprayer and worship. It does not touch my argument when a philosopher ofthe school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, 'that the origin of prayer isin Man's ignorance of the phenomena of Nature. ' That it is fear orignorance which, 'when rocked the mountains or when groaned the ground, taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray. ' My answer is, the brutes aremuch more forcibly impressed by natural phenomena than Man is; the birdand the beast know before you and I do when the mountain will rock and theground groan, and their instinct leads them to shelter; but it does notlead them to prayer. If my theory be right that Soul is to be sought notin the question whether mental ideas be innate or formed by experience, bythe sense, by association or habit, but in the inherent capacity toreceive ideas, then, the capacity bestowed on Man alone, to be impressedby Nature herself with the idea of a Power superior to Nature, with whichPower he can establish commune, is a proof that to Man alone the Maker hasmade Nature itself proclaim His existence, --that to Man alone the Deityvouchsafes 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 ofHis creature alter the ways of His will?"

"For the answer to a question, " returned Faber, "which is not unfrequentlyasked by the clever men of the world, I ought to refer you to the skilledtheologians who have so triumphantly carried the reasoner over that fordof doubt which is crossed every day by the infant. But as we have nottheir books in the wilderness, I am contented to draw my reply as anecessary and logical sequence from the propositions I have sought toground on the plain observation of Nature. I can only guess at theDeity's Omniscience, or His modes of enforcing His power by theobservation of His general laws; and of all His laws, I know of none moregeneral than the impulse which bids men pray, --which makes Nature so act, that all the phenomena of Nature we can conceive, however startling andinexperienced, do not make the brute pray, but there is not a trouble thatcan 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 thephilosopher, to whose wildest guess our obligations are infinite, butsimply because for all which is impulsive to Man, there is a reason inNature which no philosophy can explain away. I do not, then, bewildermyself by seeking to bind and limit the Omniscience of the Deity to myfinite ideas. I content myself with supposing that somehow or other, Hehas made it quite compatible with His Omniscience that Man should obey theimpulse which leads him to believe that, in addressing a Deity, he isaddressing a tender, compassionate, benignant Father, and in thatobedience shall obtain beneficial results. If that impulse be anillusion, then we must say that Heaven governs the earth by a lie; andthat is impossible, because, reasoning by analogy, all Nature istruthful, --that is, Nature gives to no species instincts or impulses whichare not of service to it. Should I not be a shallow physician if, where Ifind in the human organization a principle or a property so general that Imust believe it normal to the healthful conditions of that organization, Ishould refuse to admit that Nature intended it for use? Reasoning by allanalogy, must I not say the habitual neglect of its use must more or lessinjure the harmonious well-being of the whole human system? I could havemuch to add upon the point in dispute by which the creed implied in yourquestion would enthrall the Divine mercy by the necessities of its Divinewisdom, and substitute for a benignant Deity a relentless Fate. But hereI should exceed my province. I am no theologian. Enough for me that inall my afflictions, all my perplexities, an impulse, that I obey as aninstinct, moves me at once to prayer. Do I find by experience that theprayer is heard, that the affliction is removed, the doubt is solved?That, indeed, would be presumptuous to say. But it is not presumptuous tothink that by the efficacy of prayer my heart becomes more fortifiedagainst the sorrow, and my reason more serene amidst the doubt. "

I listened, and ceased to argue. I felt as if in that solitude, and inthe pause of my wonted mental occupations, my intellect was growinglanguid, and its old weapons rusting in disuse. My pride took alarm. Ihad so from my boyhood cherished the idea of fame, and so glorified thesearch after knowledge, that I recoiled in dismay from the thought that Ihad relinquished knowledge, and cut myself off from fame. I resolved toresume my once favourite philosophical pursuits, re-examine and completethe Work to which I had once committed my hopes of renown; and, simultaneously, a restless desire seized me to communciate, though but atbrief intervals, with other minds than those immediately within myreach, --minds fresh from the old world, and reviving the memories of itsvivid civilization. Emigrants frequently passed my doors, but I hadhitherto shrunk from tendering the hospitalities so universally accordedin the colony. I could not endure to expose to such rough strangers myLilian's mournful affliction, and that thought was not less intolerable toMrs. Ashleigh. I now hastily constructed a log-building a few hundredyards from the house, and near the main track taken by travellers throughthe spacious pastures. I transported to this building my books andscientific instruments. In an upper story I placed my telescopes andlenses, my crucibles and retorts. I renewed my chemical experiments; Isought to invigorate my mind by other branches of science which I hadhitherto less cultured, --meditated new theories on Light and Colour, collected specimens in Natural History, subjected animalcules to mymicroscope, geological fossils to my hammer. With all these quickenedoccupations of thought, I strove to distract myself from sorrow, andstrengthen my reason against the, illusion of my fantasy. The LuminousShadow was not seen again on my wall, and the thought of Margrave himselfwas banished. 

In this building I passed many hours of each day; more and more earnestlyplunging my thoughts into depths of abstract study, as Lilian'sunaccountable dislike to my presence became more and more decided. When Ithus ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted hers, my heart'soccupation was gone. I had annexed to the apartment reserved for myselfin the log-hut a couple of spare rooms, in which I could accommodatepassing strangers. I learned to look forward to their coming withinterest, and to see them depart with regret; yet, for the most part, theywere of the ordinary class of colonial adventurers, --bankrupt tradesmen, unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics, hordes of unskilled labourers, now andthen a briefless barrister, or a sporting collegian who had lost his allon the Derby. One day, however, a young man of education and manners thatunmistakably proclaimed the cultured gentleman of Europe, stopped at mydoor. He was a cadet of a noble Prussian family, which for some politicalreasons had settled itself in Paris; there he had become intimate withyoung French nobles, and living the life of a young French noble had soonscandalized his German parents, forestalled his slender inheritance, andbeen compelled to fly his father's frown and his tailor's bills. All thishe told me with a lively frankness which proved how much the wit of aGerman can be quickened in the atmosphere of Paris. An old collegefriend, of birth inferior to his own, had been as unfortunate in seekingto make money as this young prodigal had been an adept in spending it. The friend, a few years previously, had accompanied other Germans in amigration to Australia, and was already thriving; the spendthrift noblewas on his way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fiftymiles distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I evermet. He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchmangives to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He ownedhimself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not onlydisarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, thehappy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope, --sure that he should be richbefore he was thirty. How and wherefore rich, he could have no moreexplained than I can square the circle. When the grand serious Germannature 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'scourtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in hisdust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck intohis belt, I would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as criticover the holiday world not to have said, "There smiles the genius beyondmy laws, the born darling of the Graces, who in every circumstance, inevery age, like Aristippus, would have socially charmed; would have beenwelcome to the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius, to the boudoirs of aMontespan or a Pompadour; have lounged through the Mulberry Gardens with aRochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the death-cart, with aRichelieu and a Lauzun, a gentleman's disdain of a mob!"

I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his carelesslips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that light talk wasflung 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 everhad 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 ofwhom I speak flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince of theBourse a palace that might have lodged a prince of the blood-royal, eclipsed our Jew bankers in splendour, our jeunesse doree in good looksand hair-brain adventures, and, strangest of all, filled his salons withphilosophers and charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting thegravest dons of the schools by bringing them face to face with the mostimpudent quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers, --and yet, withal, himselfso racy and charming, so bon prince, so bon enfant! For six months he wasthe rage at Paris: perhaps he might have continued to be the rage therefor six years, but all at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as it hadflashed. Is this the Margrave whom you know?"

"I should not have thought the Margrave whom I knew could have reconciledhis tastes to the life of cities. "

"Nor could this man: cities were too tame for him. He has gone to somefar-remote wilds in the East, --some say in search of the Philosopher'sStone; 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 owncrucible. After that misfortune, Margrave took Paris in disgust, and welost 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 andyet free from the spleen; I envied him because one had only to look at hisface and see how thoroughly he enjoyed the life of which your countrymenseem to be so heartily tired. But now that I have satisfied yourcuriosity, 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 whichwas the most generally favoured. This gentleman, whose name I forget, butwho was one of those old roues who fancy themselves young because theylive 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! Butno--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 hehated his lawful heirs, and left behind him a fortune so far below thatwhich he was known to possess that he must certainly have disposed of itsecretly before his death. Why so dispose of it, if not to enrich somenatural son, whom, for private reasons, he might not have wished toacknowledge, 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 wealthconfirmed 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 mineby a week; and, happily, all Paris was so busy in talking of it, that Islipped away without notice. "

And the Prussian then named a date which it thrilled me to hear, for itwas in that very month, and about that very day, that the Luminous Shadowhad stood within my threshold. 

The young count now struck off into other subjects of talk: nothing morewas said of Margrave. An hour or two afterwards he went on his way, and Iremained long gazing musingly on the embers of the dying glow on myhearth. 

[1] "Are intelligence and instinct, thus differing in their relativeproportion in man as compared with all other animals, yet the same in kindand manner of operation in both? To this question we must give at once anaffirmative answer. The expression of Cuvier, regarding the faculty ofreasoning in lower animals, 'Leur intelligence execute des operations dumeme genre, ' is true in its full sense. We can in no manner define reasonso as to exclude acts which are at every moment present to ourobservation, and which we find in many instances to contravene the naturalinstincts of the species. The demeanour and acts of the dog in referenceto his master, or the various uses to which he is put by man, are asstrictly logical as those we witness in the ordinary transactions oflife. "--Sir Henry Holland, chapters on "Mental Physiology, " p. 220. 

The whole of the chapter on Instincts and Habits in this work should beread in connection with the passage just quoted. The work itself, at oncecautious and suggestive, is not one of the least obligations whichphilosophy and religion alike owe to the lucubrations of English medicalmen. 

[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 hisrecent work, "La Vie dans l'Homme, " p. 255, gives a long and illustriouslist of philosophers who assign a rational soul (ame) to the inferioranimals, though he truly adds, "that they have not always the courage oftheir opinion. "

[5] Some idea of the extent of research and imagination bestowed on thissubject 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 Ishould observe, that here and elsewhere in the dialogues between Faber andFenwick, it has generally been thought better to substitute the words ofthe author quoted for the mere outline or purport of the quotation whichmemory afforded to the interlocutor.