fact_: we start out of
Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the
veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and
aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial
harp-strings, like the Song of beautified Souls? And again, do not we
squeak and jibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish 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, even 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 round 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 through 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 war-horse 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 giddy Alpine heights of
Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war
with his fello