erse, and was surrounded
only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many
phases of strange, unnatural experience as there were flitting
smoke-wreaths eddying about him.

There are depths in man's nature and his possibilities which no plummet
has ever sounded,--the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the
perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time,
to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can
we understand the facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, of
those men and women who have found such strange raptures in slow tortures,
prolonged from year to year, till pain became a habit of body and mind? It
is said, that, after the tortures of the rack, the reaction of the
overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most exquisite relief and
repose; and so when mind and body are harrowed, harassed to the very outer
verge of endurance, come wild throbbings and transports, and strange
celestial clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the New
Jerusalem into his soul.

It had seemed to Father Francesco, when he came down from the mountain,
that he had left his body behind him,--that he had left earth and earthly
things; his very feet touching the ground seemed to tread not on rough,
resisting soil, but upon elastic cloud. He saw a strange excess of beauty
in every flower, in every leaf, in the wavering blue of the sea, in the
red grottoed rocks that overhung the shore, with their purple, green,
orange, and yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf-tapestry. The songs of the
fishermen on the beach, the peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder for the
cattle, all seemed to him to have an unnatural charm. As one looking
through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on every object, so he
beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed to him something forever
past and gone. He looked at himself as at another person, who had sinned
and suffered, and was now resting in beatified repose; and he fondly
thought all this was firm reality, and believed that he was now proof
against all earthly impressions, able to hear and to judge with the
dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not know that this
high-strung calmness, this fine clearness, were only the most intense form
of nervous sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to every mortal
impression as is the vitalized chemical plate to the least action of the
sun's rays