yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body
in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to
shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss
the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter
deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I
have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound
for ever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast
it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident,
my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised
my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the
powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which
these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form
and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they
were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of
an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at
last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a
large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments,
to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I
compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the
glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of
courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour
of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and
I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something
strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very
novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body;
within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered
sensual images running like