e.

"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may
bear into the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general
perception, too pure for even exceptional recognition."

"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says
true, holds many mystic signals which the past and present could address
only to the future,--signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but
which the freemasonry of higher intelligence shall render plain in the
time hereafter."

"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,--"what if I had
come to add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may
be for other times? What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we
common men, who find a life full of active duties presented to our
acceptance,--should such as we, I say, receive this world as a pageant
before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The conceit of
external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind
only an awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now
tolerated, but an extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether
wanting the perception, that, rising from the gross symbols of language,
can know the subtile and precious emotion which in a more advanced state
of being those symbols might suggest."

As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous
excitability, I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what
he said, or even demand that it be made intelligible by further
explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied in striving to identify
this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance, the pastor
of the First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had
once been said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality
popularly known as "The Transcendentalists." But this was many years
ago; and the world always supposed that he had outgrown his early
errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England, a more
genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to
resist the social influences into which they may be thrown. This was
probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from
the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life
seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy s