ed since my marriage had wiled me away to a great extent
from places where I knew no peace could dwell. But suddenly,--I think,
indeed, it was the work of a single night, as I lay awake on my bed
gazing into the darkness,--suddenly, I say, the old desire, the former
longing returned, and returned with a force that had been intensified
ten times by its absence; and when the day dawned and I looked out of
the window and saw with haggard eyes the sun rise in the East, I knew
that my doom had been pronounced; that as I had gone far, so now I must
go farther with steps that know no faltering. I turned to the bed where
my wife was sleeping peacefully, and lay down again weeping bitter
tears, for the sun had set on our happy life and had risen with a dawn
of terror to us both. I will not set down here in minute detail what
followed; outwardly I went about the day's labour as before, saying
nothing to my wife. But she soon saw that I had changed. I spent my
spare time in a room which I had fitted up as a laboratory, and often I
crept upstairs in the gray dawn of the morning, when the light of many
lamps still glowed over London; and each night I had stolen a step
nearer to that great abyss which I was to bridge over, the gulf between
the world of consciousness and the world of matter. My experiments were
many and complicated in their nature, and it was some months before I
realized whither they all pointed, and when this was borne in upon me
in a moment's time, I felt my face whiten and my heart still within me.
But the power to draw back, the power to stand before the doors that
now opened wide before me and not to enter in, had long ago been
absent; the way was closed, and I could only pass onward. My position
was as utterly hopeless as that of the prisoner in an utter dungeon,
whose only light is that of the dungeon above him; the doors were shut
and escape was impossible. Experiment after experiment gave the same
result, and I knew, and shrank even as the thought passed through my
mind, that in the work I had to do there must be elements which no
laboratory could furnish, which no scales could ever measure. In that
work, from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must
enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men
call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there
is no vacant chamber), in its place would enter in what the lips can
hardly utter, what the mind cannot