and child, the wise and the ignorant, took from
their souls as in-born! Man and fiend had alike
failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not
abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and
selfish, not dead to the hero's devotion, willing
to shed every drop of its blood for a something
more dear than an animal's life for itself! What
remained—what remained for man's hope?—
man's mind and man's heart thus exhausting
their all with no other result but despair? What
remained but the mystery of mysteries, so clear
to the sunrise of childhood, the sunset of age,
only dimmed by the clouds which collect round
the noon of our manhood? Where yet was Hope
found? In the soul; in its every-day impulse to
supplicate comfort and light, from the Giver
of soul, wherever the heart is afflicted, the mind
is obscured.

Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me:
"What mourner can be consoled, if the Dead
die for ever?" Through every pulse of my
frame throbbed that dread question. All Nature
around seemed to murmur it. And suddenly, as
by a flash from Heaven, the grand truth in
Faber's grand reasoning shone on me, and lighted
up all, within and without. Man alone, of all
earthly creatures, asks, "Can the Dead die for
ever?" and the instinct that urges the question
is God's answer to man! No instinct is given
in vain.

And, born with the instinct of soul is the
instinct that leads the soul from the seen to the
unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent
that foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the
source of its stream, far aloft from the Ocean.

"Know thyself," said the Pythian of old.
"That precept descended from Heaven." Know
thyself! is that maxim wise? If so, know thy
soul. But never yet did man come to the
thorough conviction of soul, but what he
acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer.
In my awe, in my rapture, all my thoughts
seemed enlarged and illumed and exalted. I
prayed—all my soul seemed one prayer. All my
past, with its pride and presumption and folly,
grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling
for pardon before setting forth on the
pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. And, sure now, in
the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that
the Dead do not die for ever, my human love
soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow.
Daring not to ask from Heaven's wisdom that
Lilian, for my sake, might not yet pass away
from the earth, I prayed that my soul might be
fitted to bear with submission whatever my
Maker might ordain. And, if surviving her,
without whom no beam from yon material sun
could ever warm into joy a morrow in human
life—so to guide my steps that they might rejoin
her at last, and, in rejoining, regain for ever!

How trivial now became the weird riddles that,
a little while before, had been clothed in so
solemn an awe. What mattered it to the vast
interests involved in the clear recognition of Soul
and Hereafter,—whether or not my bodily sense,
for a moment, obscured the face of the Nature,
I should one day behold as a spirit? Doubtless
the sights and the sounds which had haunted the
last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber
would strip of their magical seemings;—the Eyes
in the space and the Foot in the circle might be
those of no terrible Demons, but of the Wild's
savage children whom I had seen, halting, curious
and mute, in the light of the morning. The
tremour of the ground (if not, as heretofore,
explicable by the illusory impression of my own
treacherous senses) might be but the natural
effect of elements struggling yet under a soil
unmistakably charred by volcanoes. The luminous
atoms dissolved in the caldron might as little
be fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendours
of naphtha or phosphor. As it was, the weird
rite had no magic result. The magician was not
rent limb from limb by the fiends. By causes as
natural as ever extinguished life's spark in the
frail lamp of clay, he had died out of sight—
under the black veil.

What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far
grander questions and answers, whether Reason,
in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed
aright, was but a word of small mark in the
mystical language of Nature? If all the arts of
enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by
facts which Sages were forced to acknowledge,
Sages would sooner or later find some cause for
such portents—not supernatural. But what
Sage, without cause supernatural, both without
and within him, can guess at the wonders he
views in the growth of a blade of grass, or the
tints on an insect's wing? Whatever art Man
can achieve in his progress through time, Man's
reason, in time, can suffice to explain. But the
wonders of God? These belong to the Infinite;
and these, O Immortal! will but develop new
wonder on wonder, though thy sight be a spirit's,
and thy leisure to track and to solve, an
eternity.

As I raised my face from my clasped hands,
my eyes fell full upon a form standing in the
open doorway. There, where on the night in
which Lilian's long struggle for reason and life
had begun, the Luminous Shadow had been
beheld in the doubtful light of a dying moon and
a yet hazy dawn; there, on the threshold, gathering
round her bright locks the auriole of the
glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child! And
as I gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the
silenced house, and that Image of Peace on its
threshold, I felt that Hope met me at the door—
Hope in the child's steadfast eyes— Hope in the
child's welcoming smile!

"I was at watch for you," whispered Amy.
"All is well."

"She lives still—she lives! Thank God—
thank God!"

"She lives she will recover!" said another
voice, as my head sunk on Faber's shoulder.
"For some hours in the night her sleep was
disturbed—convulsed. I feared, then, the worst.