est manifestations. Well! so it is with me; I have within
me a mirror before which the moral nature, with its causes and effects,
appears and is reflected. Entering thus into the consciousness of others
I am able to divine both the future and the past. How? do you still ask
how? Imagine that the marble statue is the body of a man, a piece of
statuary in which we see the emotion, sentiment, passion, vice or crime,
virtue or repentance which the creating hand has put into it, and
you will then comprehend how it is that I read the soul of this
foreigner--though what I have said does not explain the gift of
Specialism; for to conceive the nature of that gift we must possess it."

Though Wilfrid belonged to the two first divisions of humanity, the men
of force and the men of thought, yet his excesses, his tumultuous life,
and his misdeeds had often turned him towards Faith; for doubt has two
sides; a side to the light and a side to the darkness. Wilfrid had too
closely clasped the world under its forms of Matter and of Mind not to
have acquired that thirst for the unknown, that longing to _go beyond_
which lay their grasp upon the men who know, and wish, and will.
But neither his knowledge, nor his actions, nor his will, had found
direction. He had fled from social life from necessity; as a great
criminal seeks the cloister. Remorse, that virtue of weak beings,
did not touch him. Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again.
Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all. But in traversing the world,
which he made his cloister, Wilfrid had found no balm for his wounds; he
saw nothing in nature to which he could attach himself. In him, despair
had dried the sources of desire. He was one of those beings who, having
gone through all passions and come out victorious, have nothing more to
raise in their hot-beds, and who, lacking opportunity to put themselves
at the head of their fellow-men to trample under iron heel entire
populations, buy, at the price of a horrible martyrdom, the faculty of
ruining themselves in some belief,--rocks sublime, which await the touch
of a wand that comes not to bring the waters gushing from their far-off
spring.

Led by a scheme of his restless, inquiring life to the shores of Norway,
the sudden arrival of winter had detained the wanderer at Jarvis. The
day on which, for the first time, he saw Seraphita, the whole past of
his life faded from his mind. The young girl excited emotions which he
had th