elves are the common property of all men; yet, from
words themselves, Thou Architect of Immortalities, pilest up temples
that shall outlive the Pyramids, and the very leaf of the Papyrus
becomes a Shinar, stately with towers, round which the Deluge of Ages,
shall roar in vain!

But in that solitude has the Presence that there had invoked its wonders
left no enchantment of its own? It seemed so; for as Viola stood in the
chamber, she became sensible that some mysterious change was at work
within herself. Her blood coursed rapidly, and with a sensation of
delight, through her veins,--she felt as if chains were falling from
her limbs, as if cloud after cloud was rolling from her gaze. All the
confused thoughts which had moved through her trance settled and centred
themselves in one intense desire to see the Absent One,--to be with him.
The monads that make up space and air seemed charged with a spiritual
attraction,--to become a medium through which her spirit could pass from
its clay, and confer with the spirit to which the unutterable desire
compelled it. A faintness seized her; she tottered to the seat on which
the vessels and herbs were placed, and, as she bent down, she saw in one
of the vessels a small vase of crystal. By a mechanical and involuntary
impulse, her hand seized the vase; she opened it, and the volatile
essence it contained sparkled up, and spread through the room a powerful
and delicious fragrance. She inhaled the odour, she laved her temples
with the liquid, and suddenly her life seemed to spring up from the
previous faintness,--to spring, to soar, to float, to dilate upon the
wings of a bird. The room vanished from her eyes. Away, away, over lands
and seas and space on the rushing desire flies the disprisoned mind!

Upon a stratum, not of this world, stood the world-born shapes of the
sons of Science, upon an embryo world, upon a crude, wan, attenuated
mass of matter, one of the Nebulae, which the suns of the myriad systems
throw off as they roll round the Creator's throne*, to become themselves
new worlds of symmetry and glory,--planets and suns that forever and
forever shall in their turn multiply their shining race, and be the
fathers of suns and planets yet to come.

(*"Astronomy instructs us that, in the original condition of
the solar system, the sun was the nucleus of a nebulosity or
luminous mass which revolved on its axis, and extended far
beyond the orbits of all the pl