lated me into a new creature. Man is doubtless
_one_ by some subtle _nexus_ that we cannot perceive, extending from the
new-born infant to the superannuated dotard; but as regards many
affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he
is _not_ one: the unity of man in this respect is coextensive only with
the particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some passions, as
that of sexual love, are celestial by one half of their origin, animal
and earthly by the other half. These will not survive their own
appropriate stage. But love which is _altogether_ holy, like that
between two children, will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence
and the darkness of old age; and I repeat my belief--that unless bodily
torment should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom,
or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again for
me to illuminate the hour of death.

LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman
symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for
very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you.
Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant the
earliest office of ennobling kindness,--typical, by its mode, of that
grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in
powers invisible which even in pagan worlds sometimes descends to
sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for
the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the
ground. _That_ might, bear different interpretations. But immediately,
lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant,
either the paternal hand as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near
kinsman as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect
as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars,
saying perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!"
This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that
mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams),
but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as
still it is the Italian verb) _levare_, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen that some
people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that cont