I had won to my life! But how distinctly dissimilar is man in his conduct
from man in his systems! See the poet reclined under forest boughs,
conning odes to his mistress; follow him out into the world; no mistress
ever lived for him there![2] See the hard man of science, so austere in
his passionless problems; follow him now where the brain rests from its
toil, where the heart finds its Sabbath--what child is so tender, so
yielding, and soft?

But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet and sage are dust, and
no more, when the pulse ceases to beat. And on that consolatory
conclusion my pen stopped.

Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh,--a compassionate, mournful
sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat, looked round,
amazed to discover no one,--no living thing! The windows were closed, the
night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But there, in
the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness, vaguely
shaped as a human form, receding, fading, gone! Why, I know not--for no
face was visible, no form, if form it were, more distinct than the
colourless outline,--why, I know not, but I cried aloud, "Lilian!
Lilian!" My voice came strangely back to my own ear; I paused, then
smiled and blushed at my folly. "So I, too, have learned what is
superstition," I muttered to myself. "And here is an anecdote at my own
expense (as Muller frankly tells us anecdotes of the illusions which
would haunt his eyes, shut or open),--an anecdote I may quote when I come
to my chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms." I
went on with my book, and wrote till the lights waned in the gray of the
dawn. And I said then, in the triumph of my pride, as I laid myself down
to rest, "I have written that which allots with precision man's place in
the region of nature; written that which will found a school, form