hough they were not his, had wonders to tell which always passed mine
by a degree; his experiences were more various and marvellous than mine,
yet he had a reason for everything, to which I was compelled to defer
without being convinced. "Yes," said he, finally knocking out the ashes
from his meerschaum, as we rose, at the Doctor's suggestion, to take a
row out on the lake while the sun was setting,--"Yes, I believe in
_your_ kind of a 'spiritual world,'--but that it is purely subjective."

I was silenced in a moment;--this single sentence, spoken like the
expression of the experience of a lifetime, produced an effect which all
his logic could not. He had rubbed some talismanic opal, pronouncing the
spirit-compelling sentence engraved thereon, and a new world of doubts
and mysteries, marvels and revelations burst on me. One phase of
existence, which had been hitherto a reality to me, melted away into the
thinness of an uncompleted dream; but as it melted away, there appeared
behind it a whole universe, of which I had never before dreamed. I had
puzzled my brains over the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity
and found only words; now I grasped and comprehended the round of the
thing. I looked through the full range of human cognitions, and found,
from beginning to end, a proclamation of the presence of that
arch-magician, Imagination. I had said to myself,--"The universe is
subjective to Deity, objective to me; but if I am his image, what is
that part of me which corresponds to the Creator in Him?" Here I found
myself, at last, the creator of a universe of unsubstantialities, all of
the stuff that dreams are made of, and all alike unconsciously evoked,
whether they were the dreams of sleep or the hauntings of waking hours.
I grew bewildered as the thought loomed up in its eternal significance,
and a thousand facts and phenomena, which had been standing in the
darkness around my little circle of vision, burst into light and
recognition, as though they had been waiting beyond the outer verge for
the magic words. J. had spoken them.

Silent, almost for the moment unconscious of external things, in the
intense exaltation of thought and feeling, I walked down to the shore.
Taking the lightest and fleetest of our boats, we pushed off on the
perfectly tranquil water. There was no flaw in the mirror which gave us
a duplicated world. Line for line, tint for tint, the noble mountain
that lifts itself at the east, robed in p