to that which sometimes seizes upon men who have given themselves up
to protracted contemplations. If some strong thought bears upward on
phantasmal wing a man of learning or a poet, isolates him from the
external circumstances which environ him here below, and leads him
forward through illimitable regions where vast arrays of facts become
abstractions, where the greatest works of Nature are but images, then
woe betide him if a sudden noise strikes sharply on his senses and
calls his errant soul back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The
shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,--one of which
partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other
shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies
destruction,--this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this
painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings.
The body receives back the flame that consumes it; the flame has once
more grasped its prey. This fusion, however, does not take place
without convulsions, explosions, tortures; analogous and visible signs
of which may be seen in chemistry, when two antagonistic substances
which science has united separate.

For the last few days whenever Wilfrid entered Seraphita's presence
his body seemed to fall away from him into nothingness. With a single
glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where
meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision
transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,--each and all have
their own path to the Height, their own guide to reach it, their own
individual sufferings in the dire return. In that sphere alone all
veils are rent away, and the revelation, the awful flaming certainty
of an unknown world, of which the soul brings back mere fragments to
this lower sphere, stands revealed. To Wilfrid one hour passed with
Seraphita was like the sought-for dreams of Theriakis, in which each