morrow in human life--so to guide my steps that they might rejoin her at
last, and, in rejoining, regain forever!

How trivial now became the weird riddle that, a little while before, had
been clothed in so solemn an awe! What mattered it to the vast interests
involved in the clear recognition of Soul and Hereafter, whether or not my
bodily sense, for a moment, obscured the face of the Nature I should one
day behold as a spirit? Doubtless the sights and the sounds which had
haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip of
their magical seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the circle
might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage children
whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the morning.
The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by the
illusory impression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the natural
effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably charred by
volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron might as little be
fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendours of naphtha or phosphor.
As it was, the weird rite had no magic result. The magician was not rent
limb from limb by the fiends. By causes as natural as ever extinguished
life's spark in the frail lamp of clay, he had died out of sight--under
the black veil.

What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and
answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a word
of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If all the arts of
enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by facts which Sages were
forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or later find some cause for
such portents--not supernatural. But what Sage, without cause
supernatural, both without and within him, can guess at the wonders he