thyself."

"Mummery! What would you drive at?"

"Wilt thou fast three days, and for three nights abstain from sleep, and
then visit me once again?"

"No, fair deluder; such a preliminary is too much to ask of a Neophyte.
Three days without food, and three nights without sleep! Why, you would
have to raise myself from the dead!"

"And canst thou," said the diviner, with great dignity, "canst thou hope
that thou wouldst be worthy of a revelation from a higher world--that
for thee the keys of the grave should unlock their awful treasure, and
the dead return to life, when thou scruplest to mortify thy flesh and
loosen the earthly bonds that cumber and chain the spirit? I tell thee,
that only as the soul detaches itself from the frame, can its inner
and purer sense awaken, and the full consciousness of the invisible and
divine things that surround it descend upon its powers."

"And what," said Radclyffe, startled more by the countenance and voice
than the words themselves of the soothsayer; "what would you then do,
supposing that I perform this penance?"

"Awaken to their utmost sense, even to pain and torture, the naked
nerves of that Great Power thou callest the Imagination; that Power
which presides over dreams and visions, which kindles song, and lives
in the heart of Melodies; which inspired the Magian of the East and
the Pythian voices--and, in the storms and thunder of savage lands
originated the notion of a God and the seeds of human worship; that vast
presiding Power which, to the things of mind, is what the Deity is to
the Universe itself--the creator of all. I would awaken, I say, that
Power from its customary sleep where, buried in the heart, it folds its
wings, and lives but by fits and starts, unquiet, but unaroused; and
by that Power thou wouldst see, and feel, and know, and through it only
thou wouldst exist. So that it would be with thee, as if the body were
not: as if thou wert already all-spiritual, all-living. So thou wouldst
learn in life that which may be open to thee after death; and so, soul
might now, as hereafter, converse with soul, and revoke the Past, and
sail prescient down the dark tides of the Future. A brief and fleeting
privilege, but dearly purchased: be wise, and disbelieve in it; be
happy, and reject it!"

Radclyffe was impressed, despite himself, by the solemn novelty of this
language, and the deep mournfulness with which the soothsayer's last
sentence died away.

"And how," sa