ilence of the night.

Apollyon then, as if by habit, as he had shared all their occupations
of late, had taken his seat beside them, meekly enough, at first with
the manner of a mere suppliant for the [163] crumbs of their high
studies. But, straightway again, he surprises by more than racing
forward incredibly on the road to facts, and from facts to luminous
doctrine; Prior Saint-Jean himself, in comparison, seeming to lag
incompetently behind. He can but wonder at this strange scholar's
knowledge of a distant past, evidenced in his familiarity (it was as if
he might once have spoken them) with the dead languages in which their
text-books are written. There was more surely than the utmost merely
natural acuteness in his guesses as to the words intended by those
crabbed contractions, of their meaning, in his sense of allusions and
the like. An ineffaceable memory it might rather seem of the entire
world of which those languages had been the living speech, once more
vividly awake under the Prior's cross-questioning, and now more than
supplementing his own laborious search.

And at last something of the same kind happens with himself. Had he,
on his way hither from the convent, passed unwittingly through some
river or rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all his so
carefully accumulated intellectual baggage of fact and theory? The
hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the stars,
of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding to the
abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have deserted him; to be
revived in him again [164] however, at the contact of this
extraordinary pupil or fellow-inquirer, though in a very different
guise or attitude towards himself, as matters no longer to be reasoned
upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be looked at and heard.
Did not he see the angle of the earth's axis with the ecliptic, the
deflexions of the stars from their proper orbits with fatal results
here below, and the earth--wicked, unscriptural truth!--moving round
the sun, and those flashes of the eternal and unorbed light such as
bring water, flowers, living things, out of the rocks, the dust? The
singing of the planets: he could hear it, and might in time effect its
notation. Having seen and heard, he might erelong speak also, truly
and with authority, on such matters. Could one but arrest it for one's
self, for final transference to others, on the written or print