appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is
crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space?
The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it
knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very
charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true?
Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself,
is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of
universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf,
than the swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the
leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more
gifted things that hover in the illimitable air. Yet between these last
and man is a mysterious and terrible affinity. And hence, by tales and
legends, not wholly false nor wholly true, have arisen from time to
time, beliefs in apparitions and spectres. If more common to the earlier
and simpler tribes than to the men of your duller age, it is but that,
with the first, the senses are more keen and quick. And as the savage
can see or scent miles away the traces of a foe, invisible to the gross
sense of the civilised animal, so the barrier itself between him and
the creatures of the airy world is less thickened and obscured. Do you
listen?"

"With my soul!"

"But first, to penetrate this barrier, the soul with which you listen
must be sharpened by intense enthusiasm, purified from all earthlier
desires. Not without reason have the so-styled magicians, in all
lands and times, insisted on chastity and abstemious reverie as the
communicants of inspiration. When thus prepared, science can be brought
to aid it; the sight itself may be rendered more subtle, the nerves more
acute, the spirit more alive and outward, and the element itself--the