ON SPACE AND TIME.

"Deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, Space and Time. These-as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial Me for dwelling here, and yet to blind it―lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, on this Phantom existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can at best but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

"Fortunatus had a Wishing-Hat, which when he put on and wished himself Anywhere, behold he was there. By this means had Fortunatus triumphed over Space; for him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were a hatter to establish himself in the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all mankind, what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side of the street, another hatter establish himself, and, as his fellow-craftsman made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both would I purchase, were it with my last groschen; but chiefly of the latter. To clap on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap on your other felt, and simply by wishing that you were Anywhen, straightway to be Then! This were indeed the grander: shooting at will from the Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire-Consummation; here historically present in the First Century, conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca; there prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of

that late Time! Thinkest thou that it were impossible, unimaginable?"

Or in a yet still loftier strain :

ON THE PAST AND THE FUTURE.

"Is the Past annihilated then, or only past? Is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already answer. Already through these mystic avenues, thou, the Earth-blinded, summonest both Past and Future, and communest with them, though as yet darkly, and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both

are.

Pierce through the Time-Element, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: That Time and Space are not God, but creations of God; that with God as it is a universal Here, so is it an everlasting Now."

And, still following up the same lofty strain of speculation, this :

ON IMMORTALITY.

"And seest thou therein any glimpse of Immortality? O Heaven! Is the white tomb of the Loved One, who died from our arms, and had to be left behind as these, which rises in the distance, like a pale receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered miles we have journeyed on alone-but a pale spectral Illusion? Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with God?-Know of a truth, that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable;

that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be,-is even now and for ever. This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayest ponder at thy leisure; for the next twenty years, or the next twenty centuries. Believe it thou must, understand it thou canst not."

Or again, this:

ON GHOSTS.

"Could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? -The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with his mind's eye as well as the body's, look round him into that full tide of Human Life he so loved? Did he never so much as look into Himself?-The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; wellnigh a million of Ghosts were traveling the streets by his side.

"Once more I say: Sweep away the Illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into Air and Invisibility?—This is no Metaphor, it is a simple scientific Fact. We start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions. Round us, as around the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as Years and Eons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harpstrings, like the song of beatified souls? And again, do we not squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screechowlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful

and feeble and fearful; or uproar (poltern) and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead-till the scent of the morning-air summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?

"Where now is Alexander of Macedon? Does the steel host that yelled in fierce battle shouts, at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, as perturbed Goblins must?-Napoleon, too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now with its howling tumult, that made night hideous, flitted away?-Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.

"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him, but are in very deed, Ghosts! These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion?-They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered around our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse fire flashes from his eyes, force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a Vision, a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance. Fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and warhorse sink beyond plummet's sounding.-Plummet's! Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago they were not; a little while and they are not; their very ashes are not.

"So has it been from the Beginning; so will it be to

the End. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission appears. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow :-and then the Heavensent is recalled, his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a Vanished Shadow.

“Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long drawn, quick-succeeding grandeurs, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage. Can the Earth, which is but dead and a Vision, resist Spirits, which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van, But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery; from God and to God.

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'"

It was for a manuscript full of such passages as these that there could not be found in all London a publisher who would venture to "translate it into print." And the only encouraging word, as far as we can learn, was the one publisher's