bed, that the language ascribed to this sinister personage lost
a gloomy pathos not the less impressive for the awe with which it was
mingled. For, till then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous
nature there were still broken glimpses of starry light; that a
character originally lofty, if irregular and fierce, had been embittered
by early and continuous war with the social world, and had, in that
war, become maimed and distorted; that, under happier circumstances, its
fiery strength might have been disciplined to good; that even now,
where remorse was so evidently poignant, evil could not be irredeemably
confirmed.

At length all the dreary compassion previously inspired vanished in one
unqualified abhorrence.

The subjects discussed changed from those which, relating to the common
world of men, were within the scope of my reason. Haroun led his
wild guest to boast of his own proficiency in magic, and, despite my
incredulity, I could not overcome the shudder with which fictions,
however extravagant, that deal with that dark Unknown abandoned to the
chimeras of poets, will, at night and in solitude, send through the
veins of men the least accessible to imaginary terrors.

Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised through the agency of evil
spirits,--a power to fascinate and to destroy. He spoke of the aid
revealed to him, now too late, which such direful allies could afford,
not only to a private revenge, but to a kingly ambition. Had he acquired
the knowledge he declared himself to possess before the feebleness of
the decaying body made it valueless, how he could have triumphed over
that world which had expelled his youth from its pale! He spoke of means
by which his influence could work undetected on the minds of others,
control agencies that could never betray, and baffle the justice that
could never discover. He spoke vaguely of a power by which a spectral
reflection of the material body could be cast, like a shadow, to a
distance; glide through the walls of a prison, elude the sentinels of
a camp,--a power that he asserted to be when enforced by concentrated
will, and acting on the mind, where in each individual temptation
found mind the weakest--almost infallible in its effect to seduce or to
appall. And he closed these and similar boasts of demoniacal arts, which
I remember too obscurely to repeat, with a tumultuous imprecation on
their nothingness to avail against the gripe of death. All this lore he
wo