seemed, with ease, to penetrate through its covering of flesh, and to
survey the mechanism of the whole interior being.

"View that tenement of clay which now seems so fair, as it was when I last
beheld it, three years ago, in the house of Haroun of Aleppo!"

I looked, and gradually, and as shade after shade falls on the mountain
side, while the clouds gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form
and face on which I looked changed from exuberant youth into infirm old
age,--the discoloured wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid
muscles, the brittle sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age alone;
the expression of the countenance had passed into gloomy discontent, and
in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the seeds of grief.

And the brain now opened on my sight, with all its labyrinth of cells. I
seemed to have the clew to every winding in the maze.

I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as, in some fable I have
read, the world of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was a brain
of magnificent formation. The powers abused to evil had been originally
of rare order,--imagination, and scope, the energies that dare, the
faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had failed to
dominate the mental,--defective veneration of what is good or great;
cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great intellect
first misguided, then perverted, and now falling with the decay of the
body into ghastly but imposing ruins,--such was the world of that brain
as it had been three years ago. And still continuing to gaze thereon, I
observed three separate emanations of light,--the one of a pale red hue,
the second of a pale azure, the third a silvery spark.