nd the wind wailed suddenly, loudly, terribly.

"By woman wailing for her Demon lover." The words were on his lips when
he raised his eyes again. A broad band of pale clear light was shining
into the room, and when he looked out of the window he saw the road all
brightened by glittering pools of water, and as the last drops of the
rain-storm starred these mirrors the sun sank into the wrack. Lucian
gazed about him, perplexed, till his eyes fell on the clock above his
empty hearth. He had been sitting, motionless, for nearly two hours
without any sense of the passage of time, and without ceasing he had
murmured those words as he dreamed an endless wonderful story. He
experienced somewhat the sensations of Coleridge himself; strange,
amazing, ineffable things seemed to have been presented to him, not in
the form of the idea, but actually and materially, but he was less
fortunate than Coleridge in that he could not, even vaguely, image to
himself what he had seen. Yet when he searched his mind he knew that the
consciousness of the room in which he sat had never left him; he had seen
the thick darkness gather, and had heard the whirl of rain hissing
through the air. Windows had been shut down with a crash, he had noted
the pattering footsteps of people running to shelter, the landlady's
voice crying to some one to look at the rain coming in under the door. It
was like peering into some old bituminous picture, one could see at last
that the mere blackness resolved itself into the likeness of trees and
rocks and travelers. And against this background of his room, and the
storm, and the noises of the street, his vision stood out illuminated,
he felt he had descended to the very depths, into the caverns that are
hollowed beneath the soul. He tried vainly to record the history of his
impressions; the symbols remained in his memory, but the meaning was all
conjecture.

The next morning, when he awoke, he could scarcely understand or realize
the bitter depression of the preceding day. He found it had all vanished
away and had been succeeded by an intense exaltation. Afterwards, when at
rare intervals he experienced the same strange possession of the
consciousness, he found this to be the invariable result, the hour of
vision was always succeeded by a feeling of delight, by sensations of
brightened and intensified powers. On that bright December day after the
storm he rose joyously, and set about the labor of the bureau with the
a