rm old
age,--the discoloured wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid
muscles, the brittle sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age
alone; the expression of the countenance had passed into gloomy
discontent, and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the seeds
of grief.

And the brain now opened on my sight, with all its labyrinth of cells. I
seemed to have the clew to every winding in the maze.

I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as, in some fable I
have read, the world of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was
a brain of magnificent formation. The powers abused to evil had been
originally of rare order,--imagination, and scope, the energies that
dare, the faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had
failed to dominate the mental,--defective veneration of what is good
or great; cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great
intellect first misguided, then perverted, and now falling with the
decay of the body into ghastly but imposing ruins,--such was the world
of that brain as it had been three years ago. And still continuing to
gaze thereon, I observed three separate emanations of light,--the one of
a pale red hue, the second of a pale azure, the third a silvery spark.

The red light, which grew paler and paler as I looked, undulated from
the brain along the arteries, the veins, the nerves. And I murmured to
myself, "Is this the principle of animal life?"

The azure light equally permeated the frame, crossing and uniting with
the red, but in a separate and distinct ray, exactly as, in the outer
world, a ray of light crosses or unites with a ray of heat, though in
itself a separate individual agency. And again I murmured to myself, "Is
this the principle of intellectual being, directing or influencing that
of animal life; with it, yet not of it?"

But the silvery spark! What was that? Its centre seemed the brain; but
I could fix it to no single organ. Nay, wherever I looked through the
system, it reflected itself as a star reflects itself upon water. And I
observed that while the red light was growing feebler and feebler, and
the azure light was confused, irregular,--now obstructed, now hurrying,
now almost lost,--the silvery spark was unaltered, un disturbed. So
independent was it of all which agitated and vexed the frame, that I
became strangely aware that if the heart stopped in its action, and the
red light died out; if the brain were paralyz