True, of labours that aspired to bring into the chart of science new
worlds, of which even the traditionary rumour was but a voice from the
land of fable--nought left but broken vestiges of a daring footstep! The
hope of a name imperishable amidst the loftiest hierarchy of Nature's
secret temple, with all the pomp of recorded experiment, that applied to
the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldwa the inductions of Bacon, the tests of
Liebig--was there nothing left of this but what, here and there, some
puzzled student might extract, garbled, mutilated, perhaps unintelligible,
from shreds of sentences, wrecks of problems! O mind of man, can the
works, on which thou wouldst found immortality below, be annulled into
smoke and tinder by an inch of candle in the hand of an old woman!

When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients. I stole
through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
into shape and order. What was delusion, and what not? Was I right or
the Public? Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of
human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
benignant ends? Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest boon
one man can bestow on another,--for life rescued, for fair name
justified? Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the
murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his own?
Had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that had
destroyed the only record of his monstrous being,--the only evidence that
I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he inspired
me?

But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his agents
only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any possible
clew to his own detection as the instigator? Then, there came over me
confused recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft, which I had read