fed with
sentiment,--why try to give them ideas?"

"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties,"
exclaimed Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the
pardonable weakness of one who has done his best. You may be guiltless
in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction."

"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.

"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in
this manuscript the result of my life,--the result of two lives. Here is
written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human
language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the
System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon
Law."

I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.

"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may
be brought to you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with
the pride of inventing arguments and detecting analogies, if they have
only given you the petty skill of a petty scholar, why then dally on
with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments, and give others the
blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."

"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may
have found, it is for your honor to promulgate."

"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual
manhood is indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters
towards earth. My responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will
now begin."

A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid
as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that
Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble
growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate
excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I
might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle
seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable
thirst that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the
manuscript, and devoured page after page. Then I felt the approaches of
a supreme despotism that might annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to
be,--that might compel me to denounce all that I had taught, to hear all
that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer at me a