and deceitful
meteor. Now mark me, child: I, noting this our error in early youth, did
resolve to see what might be effected by the culture of this renounced
and maltreated element; and finding, as I proceeded in the studies that
grew from this desire, by the occult yet guiding writings of the great
philosophers of old, that they had forestalled me in this discovery, I
resolved to learn, from their experience, by what means the imagination
is best fostered, and, as it were, sublimed.

"Anxiously following their precepts--the truth of which soon appeared--I
found that solitude, fast, intense reverie upon the one theme on which
we desired knowledge, were the true elements and purifiers of this
glorious faculty. It was by these means, and by this power, that men so
far behind us in lesser lore achieved, on the mooned plains of Chaldea
and by the dark waters of Egypt, their penetration into the womb of
Event;--by these means, and this power, the solitaries of the Gothic
time not only attained to the most intricate arcana of the stars, but to
the empire of the spirits about, above, and beneath the earth; a power,
indeed, disputed by the presumptuous sophists of the present time, but
of which their writings yet contain ample proof. Nay, by the constant
feeding, and impressing and moulding, and refining, and heightening, the
imaginative power, I do conceive that even the false prophets and the
evil practitioners of the blacker cabala clomb into the power seemingly
inconceivable--the power of accomplishing miracles and prodigies, and
to appearance belie, but in truth verify, the course of nature. By this
spirit within the flesh, we grow _from_ the flesh, and may see, and at
length invoke, the souls of the dead, and receive warnings, and hear
omens, and girdle our sleep with dreams.

"Not unto me," continued the cabalist, in a lowlier tone, "have been
vouchsafed all these gifts; for I began the art when the first fire of
youth was dim within me; and it was therefore with duller and already
earth-clogged pinions that I sought to rise. Something, however, I have
won as a recompense for austere abstinence and much labour; and this
power over the land of dreams is at least within my command."

"Then," said Lucilla, in a disappointed tone, "it is only by a long
course of indulgence to the fervour of the imagination, and not by spell
or charm, that one can gain a similar power?"

"Not wholly so, my daughter," replied the mystic; "t