"You have seen him!" I cried.

"Yes; again and again--in dreams. And always in the same way,
and with the same look. He stands before me, beckoning to me, and
making signs that I should come and help him. Not once or twice
only, but many times, night after night I have seen the same thing!"

Poor father! Poor desolate man! Not the first driven distraught
by grief; not the first deluded by the shadows of love and longing!

"You think I am deceived by hallucinations," he said,
watching my face." It is you who are misled by the scientific idiots
of the day, the wiseacres who teach us to believe, whenever soul
speaks to soul, that the highest and holiest communion attainable
by man is the product of physical disease! Forgive me the energy
of my words; but had you loved and lost your beloved---wife and
child--as I have done, you would comprehend the contempt and anger
with which I regard those modern teachers whose cold and ghastly
doctrines give the lie, not only to all human hopes and aspirations
towards the higher life, but also to the possibility of that very
progress from lower to nobler forms which is the basis of their
own philosophy, and to the conception of which the idea of the soul
and of love are essential! Evolution presupposes possible perfecting,
and the conscious adaptation of means to ends in order to attain it.
And both the ideal itself and the endeavour to reach it are
incomprehensible without desire, which is love, and whose seat is
in the interior self, the living soul--the maker of the outward form!"

He was roused from his melancholy now, and spoke