nt about the merits of Benjamin
Paul Blood.

Mr. Blood inhabits a city otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the
Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central
Railroad. What his regular or bread-winning occupation may be I know
not, but it can't have made him super-wealthy. He is an author only
when the fit strikes him, and for short spurts at a time; shy,
moreover, to the point of publishing his compositions only as private
tracts, or in letters to such far-from-reverberant organs of publicity
as the _Gazette_ or the _Recorder_ of his native Amsterdam, or the
_Utica Herald_ or the _Albany Times_. Odd places for such subtile
efforts to appear in, but creditable to American editors in these
degenerate days! Once, indeed, the lamented W. T. Harris of the old
"Journal of Speculative Philosophy" got wind of these epistles, and the
result was a revision of some of them for that review (_Philosophic
Reveries_, 1889). Also a couple of poems were reprinted from their
leaflets by the editor of _Scribner's Magazine_ ("The Lion of the
Nile," 1888, and| "Nemesis," 1899). But apart from these three dashes
before the footlights, Mr. Blood has kept behind the curtain all his
days.[2]

The author's maiden adventure was the _Anoesthetic Revelation_, a
pamphlet printed privately at Amsterdam in 1874. I forget how it fell
into my hands, but it fascinated me so "weirdly" that I am conscious of
its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since.
It gives the essence of Blood's philosophy, and shows most of the
features of his talent--albeit one finds in it little humor and no
verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision,
sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of
an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast
of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by
anaesthetics--of all things in the world--and unlike anything one ever
heard before. The practically unanimous tradition of "regular"
mysticism has been unquestionably _monistic_; and inasmuch as it is the
characteristic of mystics to speak, not as the scribes, but as men who
have "been there" and seen with their own eyes, I think that this
sovereign manner must have made some other pluralistic-minded students
hesitate, as I confess that it has often given pause to me. One cannot
criticise the vision of a mystic--one can but pass it by, or else
ac