ticism. He was known to me only through two
or three little poems of his in Catholic legends, which I much admired
for the fine sense they showed of the beauty of symbols.

He here gives a biography, mental and physical, of one of the
most remarkable cases of high nervous excitement that the age,
so interested in such, yet affords, with all its phenomena of
clairvoyance and susceptibility of magnetic influences. As to my own
mental positron on these subjects, it may be briefly expressed by
a dialogue between several persons who honor me with a portion of
friendly confidence and criticism, and myself, personified as _Free
Hope_. The others may be styled _Old Church_, _Good Sense_, and
_Self-Poise_.

DIALOGUE.

_Good Sense._ I wonder you can take any interest in such observations
or experiments. Don't you see how almost impossible it is to make them
with any exactness, how entirely impossible to know anything about
them unless made by yourself, when the least leaven of credulity,
excited fancy, to say nothing of willing or careless imposture,
spoils the whole loaf? Beside, allowing the possibility of some clear
glimpses into a higher state of being, what do we want of it now? All
around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our
instincts for this our present sphere, are but half developed. Let
us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be
completely natural, before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.
I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under
a green tree, and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm
enough in that for me.

_Free Hope._ And for me also. Nothing is truer than the Wordsworthian
creed, on which Carlyle lays such stress, that we need only look
on the miracle of every day, to sate ourselves with thought and
admiration every day. But how are our faculties sharpened to do it?
Precisely by apprehending the infinite results of every day.

Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The
ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise
his eyes from the ground? No,--but the poet who sees that field in its
relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the
ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth,
his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking!

The mind, roused powerfully by this existence, stretches of itself
into what t