h windows their
elaborate nests; and in their turn, the phantoms are stung to a keener
delight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong
senses. It were to reproach the power or the beneficence of God, to
believe those children of Alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an
urnful to the heap, nor that Caesarea[2] murdered in childhood, whom
Cleopatra bore to Caesar, nor that so brief-lived younger Pericles
Aspasia bore being so nobly born.

XIII

Because even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we
arrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone, he who
would turn magician is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to change
"barbarous words" of invocation. Communication with _Anima Mundi_ is
through the association of thoughts or images or objects; and the famous
dead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers, can still--and it is
for no other end that, all unknowing, we value posthumous fame--tread the
corridor and take the empty chair. A glove or a name can call their
bearer; the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed
habitations, and "materialisation" itself is easier, it may be, among
walls, or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them particles the vehicles
cast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies.

Certainly the mother returns from the grave, and with arms that may be
visible and solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a neglected child or
set the cradle rocking; and in all ages men have known and affirmed that
when the soul is troubled, those that are a shade and a song:

"live there,
And live like winds of light on dark or stormy air."

XIV

Awhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are
dead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors.
How is their dream changed as Time drops away and their senses multiply?
Does their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the
dreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may
still open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know
she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars
unreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words
Ben Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: "So rammed" are they "with life
they can but grow in life with being."

XV

The inflowing from their mirrored l