a home for my whole soul in those regions in which the
faithful feel the presence and the love of the deity, full of
confidence and a blessed serenity. My spirit was transfigured; all my
feelings were purified; my whole nature seemed as it were unfolding
itself in a single blossom; all within me was bliss and calm; and in
this heavenly tranquillity there was a sweet impulse to new
contemplations, a ravishing excitement to plunge yet deeper into the
flood of joy. And what was the end of it?"

"Pray go on," said Edward.

"I discovered,"--thus the old man after a pause resumed his
speech--"that here too sensuality, delusion, and folly, had again made
me their captive. Those voluptuous tears which I often shed in my
seemingly fervent devotion, which I took for the purest gush from my
heart, even they sprang only out of sensuality and a state of bodily
intoxication. My animal impulses had put on the mask of spirit; and
the deliciousness of those tears soon seduced me into endeavouring to
stir up such emotions artificially, into abusing this mysterious close
relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual
excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was
appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more
deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest
solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception had been
broken, and the vision would no more descend among the apish toys of
my imagination. When after this I wisht to pursue my inquiries beneath
the light of truth, horrour itself met me in the very spot where but
now, like a scene-painting, my rapture had been standing. I no longer
felt doubt, for even in this there is still joy; I had no certainty,
for even in the most terrible there is life; but the dead blank of the
uttermost indifference, a barren enmity to everything holy, a scorn of
all emotion, as being sheer foppishness and silliness, lay like a large
field of snow in the wildernesses of my soul.--'Soul! spirit!'--thus
I often cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from
laughter,--'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what
does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life
and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle
of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth,
to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop
back into