or a creation of, that one
indefectible mind, wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day,
for so many years? Upon what other hypothesis could he so well
understand the persistency of all these things for his own intermittent
consciousness of them, for the intermittent consciousness of so many
generations, fleeting away one after another? It was easier to
conceive of the material fabric of things as [70] but an element in a
world of thought--as a thought in a mind, than of mind as an element,
or accident, or passing condition in a world of matter, because mind
was really nearer to himself: it was an explanation of what was less
known by what was known better. The purely material world, that close,
impassable prison-wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be
actually dissolving away all around him: and he felt a quiet hope, a
quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as
a really credible opinion. It was like the break of day over some vast
prospect with the "new city," as it were some celestial New Rome, in
the midst of it. That divine companion figured no longer as but an
occasional wayfarer beside him; but rather as the unfailing
"assistant," without whose inspiration and concurrence he could not
breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, rounding, supporting
his imperfect thoughts. How often had the thought of their brevity
spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even his
present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of death, of a
coming end, in everything! How had he longed, sometimes, that there
were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory he could commit his
own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his love, Ay! the very
sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose the sense:--one strong
to retain them even though [71] he forgot, in whose more vigorous
consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening
of capacity which was all that remained of them in himself! "Oh! that
they might live before Thee"--To-day at least, in the peculiar
clearness of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in
which the experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an
abiding-place. And again, the resultant sense of companionship, of a
person beside him, evoked the faculty of conscience--of conscience, as
of old and when he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor
of self-reproach even, but of