of flesh and to survey the mechanism of the
whole interior being.

"View that tenement of clay which now seems
so fair, as it was when I last beheld it, three
years ago, in the house of Haroun of Aleppo!"

I looked, and gradually, and as shade after
shade falls on the mountain-side, while the clouds
gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form
and face on which I looked changed from
exuberant youth into infirm old age. The discoloured
wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid
muscles, the brittle sapless bones. Nor was the
change that of age alone; the expression of the
countenance had passed into gloomy discontent,
and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown
the seeds of grief.

And the brain now opened on my sight, with
all its labyrinth of cells. I seemed to have the
clue to every winding in the maze.

I saw therein a moral world, charred and
ruined, as, in some fable I have read, the world
of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was
a brain of magnificent formation. The powers
abused to evil had been originally of rare order;
imagination, and scope: the energies that dare;
the faculties that discover. But the moral part of
the brain had failed to dominate the mental.
Defective veneration of what is good or great; cynical
disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great
intellect first misguided, then perverted, and now
falling with the decay of the body into ghastly but
imposing ruins. Such was the world of that brain
as it had been three years ago. And still
continuing to gaze thereon, I observed three separate
emanations of light; the one of a pale red hue,
he second of a pale azure, the third a silvery
spark.

The red light, which grew paler and paler as I
looked, undulated from the brain along the
arteries, the veins, the nerves. And I murmured to
myself, "Is this the principle of animal life?"

The azure light equally permeated the frame,
crossing and uniting with the red, but in a
separate and distinct ray, exactly as, in the outer
world, a ray of light crosses or unites with a ray
of heat, though in itself a separate individual
agency. And again I murmured to myself, "Is
this the principle of intellectual being, directing
or influencing that of animal life; with it, yet not
of it?"

But the silvery spark! What was that? Its
centre seemed the brain. But I could fix it to
no single organ. Nay, wherever I looked
through the system, it reflected itself as a star
reflects itself upon water. And I observed that
while the red light was growing feebler and
feebler, and the azure light was confused, irregular
—now obstructed, now hurrying, now almost
lost—the silvery spark was unaltered,
undisturbed. So independent of all which agitated and
vexed the frame, that I became strangely aware
that if the heart stopped in its action, and the
red light died out, if the brain were paralysed,
that energic mind smitten into idiotcy, and the
azure light wandering objectless as a meteor
wanders over the morass,—still that silver spark
would shine the same, indestructible by aught
that shattered its tabernacle. And I murmured
to myself, "Can that starry spark speak the
presence of the soul? Does the silver light shine
within creatures to which no life immortal has
been promised by Divine Revelation?"

Involuntarily I turned my sight towards the
dead forms in the motley collection, and lo, in
my trance or my vision, life returned to them all!
To the elephant, and the serpent; to the tiger,
the vulture, the beetle, the moth; to the fish and
the polypus, and to yon mockery of man in the
giant ape.

I seemed to see each as it lived in its native realm
of earth, or of air, or of water; and the red light
played, more or less warm, through the structure
of each, and the azure light, though duller of
hue, seemed to shoot through the red, and
communicate to the creatures an intelligence far
inferior indeed to that of man, but sufficing
to conduct the current of their will, and influence
the cunning of their instincts. But in none, from
the elephant to the moth, from the bird in which
brain was the largest, to the hybrid in which life
seemed to live as in plants,—in none was visible
the starry silver spark. I turned my eyes from
the creatures around, back again to the form
cowering under the huge anaconda, and in terror
at the animation which the carcases took in the
awful illusions of that marvellous trance. For
the tiger moved as if scenting blood, and to the
eyes of the serpent the dread fascination seemed
slowly returning.

Again I gazed on the starry spark in the form
of the man. And I murmured to myself, "But
if this be the soul, why is it so undisturbed and
undarkened by the sins which have left such trace
and such ravage in the world of the brain?" And
gazing yet more intently on the spark, I became
vaguely aware that it was not the soul, but the
halo around the soul, as the star we see in heaven
is not the star itself, but its circle of rays. And if
the light itself was undisturbed and undarkened,
it was because no sins done in the body could
annihilate its essence, nor affect the eternity of
its duration. The light was clear within the
ruins of its lodgment, because it might pass
away but could not be extinguished.

But the soul itself in the heart of the light
reflected back on my own soul within me its
ineffable trouble, humiliation, and sorrow; for
those ghastly wrecks of power placed at its
sovereign command it was responsible: and, appalled
by its own sublime fate of duration, was about to
carry into eternity the account of its mission in
time. Yet it seemed that while the soul was
still there, though so forlorn and so guilty, even
the wrecks around it were majestic. And the
soul, whatever sentence it might merit, was not
among the hopelessly lost. For in its remorse
and its shame, it might still have retained what
could serve for redemption. And I saw that the
mind was storming the soul in some terrible
rebellious war—all of thought, of passion, of desire,