ple of affinities linked to similitudes (a secondary
law on which the creations of your thought are based), music, that
celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for is it not a
complement of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a modification
of air, compressed, dilated, echoed? You know the composition of
air,--oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. As you cannot obtain sound from
the void, it is plain that music and the human voice are the result of
organized chemical substances, which put themselves in unison with the
same substances prepared within you by your thought, co-ordinated
by means of light, the great nourisher of your globe. Have you ever
meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the snow, have you ever
observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants breathing in from the air
about them the metal it contains, without concluding that the sun has
fused and distributed the subtle essence which nourishes all things here
below? Swedenborg has said, 'The earth is a man.'

"Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed
beside the light which bathes a Seer. Cease, cease to question me; our
languages are different. For a moment I have used yours to cast, if it
be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you, as it were, the
hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of Prayer. Can God
abase Himself to you? Is it not for you to rise to Him? If human reason
finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to bring God down to it,
is it not evident that you must find some other path to reach Him? That
Path is in ourselves. The Seer and the Believer find eyes within their
souls more piercing far than eyes that probe the things of earth,--they
see the Dawn. Hear this truth: Your science, let it be never so exact,
your meditations, however bold, your noblest lights are Clouds. Above,
above is the Sanctuary whence the true Light flows."

She sat down and remained silent; her calm face bore no sign of the
agitation which orators betray after their least fervid improvisations.

Wilfrid bent toward Monsieur Becker and said in a low voice, "Who taught
her that?"

"I do not know," he answered.

"He was gentler on the Falberg," Minna whispered to herself.

Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said, smiling:--

"You are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. You treat Minna and me as
though we were men to whom you must talk politics or commerce; whereas
we are