human granite which serves as a boundary to the ocean of intelligence.
When man has inquired of himself whether he has seen that which he has
seen, whether he has heard the words that entered his ears, whether
the facts were facts and the idea is indeed an idea, then he resumes
his wonted bearing, thinks of his worldly interests, obeys some envoy
of death and of oblivion whose dusky mantle covers like a pall an
ancient Humanity of which the moderns retain no memory. Man never
pauses; he goes his round, he vegetates until the appointed day when
his Axe falls. If this wave force, this pressure of bitter waters
prevents all progress, no doubt it also warns of death. Spirits
prepared by faith among the higher souls of earth can alone perceive
the mystic ladder of Jacob.

After listening to Seraphita's answer in which (being earnestly
questioned) she unrolled before their eyes a Divine Perspective,--as
an organ fills a church with sonorous sound and reveals a musical
universe, its solemn tones rising to the loftiest arches and playing,
like light, upon their foliated capitals,--Wilfrid returned to his own
room, awed by the sight of a world in ruins, and on those ruins the
brilliance of mysterious lights poured forth in torrents by the hand
of a young girl. On the morrow he still thought of these things, but
his awe was gone; he felt he was neither destroyed nor changed; his
passions, his ideas awoke in full force, fresh and vigorous. He went
to breakfast with Monsieur Becker and found the old man absorbed in
the "Treatise on Incantations," which he had searched since early
morning to convince his guest that there was nothing unprecedented in
all that they had seen and heard at the Swedish castle. With the
childlike trustfulness of a true scholar he had folded down the pages
in which Jean Wier related authentic facts which proved the
possibility of the events that had happened the night before,--for to