ver, with the mind's eye as
well as with the body's, look around 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....

Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's
Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in
long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus,
like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the
Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again
into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up,
in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist
Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some
foot-print of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read
traces of the earliest Van. But whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense k