e look, an influence so weighty to bear, of so luminous a
light, so penetrating a sound, that he succumbs and kneels before it.
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are
within us. A single secret of science is a realm of wonders to the man
of learning. Do the trumpets of Power, the jewels of Wealth, the music
of Joy, or a vast concourse of people attend his mental festival? No, he
finds his glory in some dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering
man whispers a single word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted
in a mine, reveals to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every
attractive form which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated
in a wayside ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the
Divine, with all their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine
exile; he walked attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who
prayed and those who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the
Sent of God, who knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three
of his disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest
of inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material
Forms, illuminating the Spiritual Faculties, so that they saw him in his
glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.

Monsieur Becker, Wilfrid, and Minna were all under the influence of fear
as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each desired
to question. To them, in their several ways, the Swedish castle had
grown to mean some gigantic representation, some spectacle like those
whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously marshalled by the
poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to men, are real to
those who begin to penetrate the Spiritual World. On the tiers of this
Coliseum Monsieur Becker seated the gray legions of Doubt, the stern
ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked the various
antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared,
in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies
Time,--an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a broken
globe, the human universe.

Wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest
hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering
powers.

Minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought
with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds whic