ng the Host
into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming
censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the
air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him. As he
passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and
long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women
whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for
the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are
no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous
power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season;
and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the
_Darwinismus_ movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of
the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him
before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared
with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all
intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual
mysteries to reveal.

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums
from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to
elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, or
aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that
sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be
able