y sleep which thou imaginest, in thy mental darkness, would deprive
me of the resources of my art."

"Can you really, then, my father," said Lucilla, in a tone half anxious,
half timid,--"can you really, at will, conjure up in your dreams the
persons you wish to see; or draw, from sleep, any oracle concerning
their present state?"

"Of a surety," answered the astrologer; "it is one of the great--though
not perchance the most gifted--of our endowments."

"Can you teach me the method?" asked Lucilla, gravely.

"All that relates to the art I can," rejoined the mystic: "but the chief
and main power rests with thyself. For know, my daughter, that one who
seeks the wisdom that is above the earth must cultivate and excite, with
long labour and deep thought, his least earthly faculty."

Here the visionary, observing that the countenance of Lucilla was
stamped with a fixed attention, which she did not often bestow upon his
metaphysical exordiums; paused for a moment; and then pursued the theme
with the tone of one desirous of making himself at once as clear and
impressive as the nature of an abstruse science would allow.

"There are two things in the outer creation, which, according to the
great Hermes, suffice for the operation of all that is wonderful and
glorious--Fire and Earth. Even so, my child, there are in the human mind
two powers that affect all of which our nature is capable--reason and
imagination. Now mankind,--less wise in themselves than in the outer
world--have cultivated, for the most part, but one of these faculties;
and that the inferior and more passive, reason. They have tilled the
earth of the human heart, but suffered its fire to remain dormant, or
waste itself in chance and frivolous directions. Hence the insufficiency
of human knowledge. Inventions founded only on reason move within a
circle from which their escape is momentary and trivial. When some few,
endowed with a just instinct, have had recourse to the diviner element,
imagination, thou wilt observe, that they have used it only in the
service of the lighter arts, and those chiefly disconnected from reason.
Such is poetry and music, and other delicious fabrications of genius,
that amuse men, soften men, but _advance_ them not. They have--with but
rare exceptions--left this glorious and winged faculty utterly passive
in the service of Philosophy. There, reason alone has been admitted, and
imagination hath been carefully banished, as an erratic