racted general attention. Doctor Sigier, ready to begin, saw
the stately senior standing, looked round for a seat for him, and then
finding none, as the place was full, came down from his place, went to
the newcomer, and with great respect, led him to the platform of
his professor's chair, and there gave him his stool to sit upon. The
assembly hailed this mark of deference with a murmur of approval,
recognizing the old man as the orator of a fine thesis admirably argued
not long since at the Sorbonne.

The stranger looked down from his raised position on the crowd below
with that deep glance that held a whole poem of sorrow, and those who
met his eye felt an indescribable thrill. The lad, following the old
man, sat down on one of the steps, leaning against the pulpit in a
graceful and melancholy attitude. The silence was now profound, and the
doorway and even the street were blocked by scholars who had deserted
the other classes.

Doctor Sigier was to-day to recapitulate, in the last of a series of
discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to
the sympathies of the time, and gratified the immoderate love of the
marvelous, which haunts the mind of man in every age. This effort of
man to clutch the infinite, which for ever slips through his ineffectual
grasp, this last tourney of thought against thought, was a task worthy
of an assembly where the most stupendous human imagination ever known,
perhaps, at that moment shone.

The Doctor began by summing up in a mild and even tone the principal
points he had so far established:

"No intellect was the exact counterpart of another. Had man any right to
require an account of his Creator for the inequality of powers bestowed
on each? Without attempting to penetrate rashly into the designs of
God, ought we not to recognize the fact that by reason of their general
diversity intelligences could be classed in spheres? From the sphere
where the least degree of intelligence gleamed, to the most translucent
souls who could see the road by which to ascend to God, was there not
an ascending scale of spiritual gift? And did not spirits of the same
sphere understand each other like brothers in soul, in flesh, in mind,
and in feeling?"

From this the Doctor went on to unfold the most wonderful theories of
sympathy. He set forth in Biblical language the phenomena of love, of
instinctive repulsion, o