and in them I have lost more than half my empire. Not lifting them
aloft, they drag me by the strong bands of the affections to their own
earth. Exiled from the beings only visible to the most abstract sense,
the grim Enemy that guards the Threshold has entangled me in its web.
Canst thou credit me, when I tell thee that I have accepted its gifts,
and endure the forfeit? Ages must pass ere the brighter beings can again
obey the spirit that has bowed to the ghastly one! And--

....

In this hope, then, Mejnour, I triumph still; I yet have supreme power
over this young life. Insensibly and inaudibly my soul speaks to its
own, and prepares it even now. Thou knowest that for the pure and
unsullied infant spirit, the ordeal has no terror and no peril. Thus
unceasingly I nourish it with no unholy light; and ere it yet be
conscious of the gift, it will gain the privileges it has been mine to
attain: the child, by slow and scarce-seen degrees, will communicate its
own attributes to the mother; and content to see Youth forever radiant
on the brows of the two that now suffice to fill up my whole infinity of
thought, shall I regret the airier kingdom that vanishes hourly from my
grasp? But thou, whose vision is still clear and serene, look into the
far deeps shut from my gaze, and counsel me, or forewarn! I know that
the gifts of the Being whose race is so hostile to our own are, to the
common seeker, fatal and perfidious as itself. And hence, when, at the
outskirts of knowledge, which in earlier ages men called Magic,
they encountered the things of the hostile tribes, they believed the
apparitions to be fiends, and, by fancied compacts, imagined they had
signed away their souls; as if man could give for an eternity that over
which he has control but while he lives! Dark, and shrouded forever from
human sight, dwell the demon rebels, in their impenetrable realm; in
them is no breath of the Divine One. In every human creature the Divine
One breathes; and He alone can judge His own hereafter, and allot its
new career and home. Could man sell himself to the fiend, man could
prejudge himself, and arrogate the disposal of eternity! But these
creatures, modifications as they are of matter, and some with more
than the malignanty of man, may well seem, to fear and unreasoning
superstition, the representatives of fiends. And from the darkest and
mightiest of them I have accepted a boon,--the secret that startled
Death from those so dear t