! Then sawest thou
that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in
very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through
every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a
present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God,
and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.

"Again, 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 the mind's eye
as well as with 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;
well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling 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 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 beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber (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
c