med to hint, beliefs, without which life itself must be almost
impossible, principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in
that very fact? Experience certainly taught that, as regarding the
sensible world he could attend or not, almost at will, to this or that
colour, this or that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous concourse
of colour and sound, so it was also, for the well-trained intelligence,
in regard to that hum of voices which besiege the inward no less than
the outward ear. Might it be not otherwise with those various and
competing hypotheses, the permissible hypotheses, which, [65] in that
open field for hypothesis--one's own actual ignorance of the origin and
tendency of our being--present themselves so importunately, some of
them with so emphatic a reiteration, through all the mental changes of
successive ages? Might the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of
vision?

On this day truly no mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand
from afar reached him; only the peculiarly tranquil influence of its
first hour increased steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he
conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting had something
to do. The air there, air supposed to possess the singular property of
restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin. An even veil of
lawn-like white cloud had now drawn over the sky; and under its broad,
shadowless light every hue and tone of time came out upon the yellow
old temples, the elegant pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal
Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient fundamental
rock. Some half-conscious motive of poetic grace would appear to have
determined their grouping; in part resisting, partly going along with
the natural wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
precipices. An air of immense age possessed, above all, the vegetation
around--a world of evergreen trees--the olives especially, older than
how many generations of men's lives! fretted and twisted by the
combining forces of [66] life and death, into every conceivable caprice
of form. In the windless weather all seemed to be listening to the
roar of the immemorial waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among
these human habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to
age as to count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of
unalterable rest. Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the
ray which was silently quicken