ur held
with his pupil,--conversations that, while they appeared to address
themselves to the reason, inflamed yet more the fancy. It was the very
disclaiming of all powers which Nature, properly investigated, did
not suffice to create, that gave an air of probability to those which
Mejnour asserted Nature might bestow.

Thus days and weeks rolled on; and the mind of Glyndon, gradually fitted
to this sequestered and musing life, forgot at last the vanities and
chimeras of the world without.

One evening he had lingered alone and late upon the ramparts, watching
the stars as, one by one, they broke upon the twilight. Never had he
felt so sensibly the mighty power of the heavens and the earth upon man;
how much the springs of our intellectual being are moved and acted upon
by the solemn influences of Nature. As a patient on whom, slowly and by
degrees, the agencies of mesmerism are brought to bear, he acknowledged
to his heart the growing force of that vast and universal magnetism
which is the life of creation, and binds the atom to the whole. A
strange and ineffable consciousness of power, of the SOMETHING GREAT
within the perishable clay, appealed to feelings at once dim and
glorious,--like the faint recognitions of a holier and former being. An
impulse, that he could not resist, led him to seek the mystic. He would
demand, that hour, his initiation into the worlds beyond our world,--he
was prepared to breathe a diviner air. He entered the castle, and strode
the shadowy and starlit gallery which conducted to Mejnour's apartment.

CHAPTER 4.III.

Man is the eye of things.--Euryph, "de Vit. Hum."

...There is, therefore, a certain ecstatical or transporting
power, which, if at any time it shall be excited or stirred up by
an ardent desire and most strong imagination, is able to conduct
the spirit of the more outward even to some absent and
far-distant object.--Von Helmont.

The rooms that Mejnour occupied consisted of two chambers communicating
with each other, and a third in which he slept. All these rooms
were placed in the huge square tower that beetled over the dark and
bush-grown precipice. The first chamber which Glyndon entered was empty.
With a noiseless step he passed on, and opened the door that admitted
into the inner one. He drew back at the threshold, overpowered by a
strong fragrance which filled the chamber: a kind of mist thickened the
air rather than obscured it, f