oes but make more vivid than impressions from actual external objects
the ideas previously most cherished. Such ideas in the young student
were ideas of earthly fame; such ideas in the young maiden are ideas
of angel comforters and heavenly Edens. You miss her mind on the earth,
and, while we speak, it is in paradise."

"Much that you say, my friend, is authorized by the speculations of
great writers, with whom I am not unfamiliar; but in none of those
writers, nor in your encouraging words, do I find a solution for
much that has no precedents in my experience,--much, indeed, that has
analogies in my reading, but analogies which I have hitherto despised
as old wives' fables. I have bared to your searching eye the weird
mysteries of my life. How do you account for facts which you cannot
resolve into illusions,--for the influence which that strange being,
Margrave, exercised over Lilian's mind or fancy, so that for a time her
love for me was as dormant as is her reason now; so that he could draw
her--her whose nature you admit to be singularly pure and modest--from
her mother's home? The magic wand; the trance into which that wand threw
Margrave himself; the apparition which it conjured up in my own
quiet chamber when my mind was without a care and my health without
a flaw,--how account for all this: as you endeavoured, and perhaps
successfully, to account for all my impressions of the Vision in the
Museum, of the luminous, haunting shadow in its earlier apparitions,
when my fancy was heated, my heart tormented, and, it might be, even the
physical forces of this strong frame disordered?"

"Allen," said the old pathologist, "here we approach a ground which few
physicians have dared to examine. Honour to those who, like our bold
contemporary, Elliotson, have braved scoff and sacrificed dross in
seeking to extract what is practical in uses, what can be tested by
experiment, from those exceptional phenomena on which magic sought to
found a philosophy, and to which philosophy tracks the origin of magic."

"What! do I understand you? Is it you, Julius Faber, who attach faith
to the wonders attributed to animal magnetism and electro-biology, or
subscribe to the doctrines which their practitioners teach?"

"I have not examined into those doctrines, nor seen with my own eyes the
wonders recorded, upon evidence too respectable, nevertheless, to permit
me peremptorily to deny what I have not witnessed.(2) But wherever I
look thro