breath to front him. I have done my duty by him, not indeed according
to his claims, but in proportion to my faculty. Whether I shall ever
publish or not (remember) remains to be considered--that is a
different side of the subject. If I do, it _may_ be in a
magazine--or--but this is another ground. And then, I have in my head
to associate with the version, a monodrama of my own,--not a long
poem, but a monologue of Æschylus as he sate a blind exile on the
flats of Sicily and recounted the past to his own soul, just before
the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.

But my chief _intention_ just now is the writing of a sort of
novel-poem--a poem as completely modern as 'Geraldine's Courtship,'
running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into
drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so,
meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and
speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly. That is my
intention. It is not mature enough yet to be called a plan. I am
waiting for a story, and I won't take one, because I want to make one,
and I like to make my own stories, because then I can take liberties
with them in the treatment.

Who told me of your skulls and spiders? Why, couldn't I know it
without being told? Did Cornelius Agrippa know nothing without being
told? Mr. Horne never spoke it to my ears--(I never saw him face to
face in my life, although we have corresponded for long and long), and
he never wrote it to my eyes. Perhaps he does not know that I know it.
Well, then! if I were to say that _I heard it from you yourself_, how
would you answer? _And it was so._ Why, are you not aware that these
are the days of mesmerism and clairvoyance? Are you an infidel? I have
believed in your skulls for the last year, for my part.