. I began to perceive
more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling
immateriality, the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid body
in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to
shake and to pluck that fleshy vestment, even as a wind might toss the
curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply
into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been
made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on
man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second,
because as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries
were incomplete. Enough, then, that I not only recognised my natural
body for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made
up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers
should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and
countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were
the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I
knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled
and shook the very fortress of identity, might by the least scruple of
an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition,
utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to
change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at
last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a
large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments,
to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I
compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the
glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of
courage drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded; a grinding in the bones, deadly
nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour
of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I
came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something
strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very
novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body;
within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a cur