by which it had become
agonisingly clear. After a short time it returned."

Godwin describes a ghost as deliberately and exactly as he would
describe a house, and his delineation causes not the faintest
tremor. Having little imagination himself, he leaves nothing to
the imagination of the reader. In his _Lives of the
Necromancers_, he shows that he is interested in discovering the
origin of a belief in natural magic; but the life stories of the
magicians suggest no romantic pictures to his imagination. In
dealing with the mysterious and the uncanny, Godwin was
attempting something alien to his mind and temper.

In Godwin's _St. Leon_ the elixir of life is quietly bestowed on
the hero in a summer-house in his own garden. The poet, Thomas
Moore, in his romance, _The Epicurean_ (1827), sends forth a
Greek adventurer to seek it in the secret depths of the catacombs
beneath the pyramids of Egypt. He originally intended to tell his
story in verse, but after writing a fragment, _Alciphron_,
abandoned this design and decided to begin again in prose. His
story purports to be a translation of a recently discovered
manuscript buried in the time of Diocletian. Inspired by a dream,
in which an ancient and venerable man bids him seek the Nile if
he wishes to discover the secret of eternal life, Alciphron, a
young Epicurean philosopher of the second century, journeys to
Egypt. At Memphis he falls in love with a beautiful priestess,
Alethe, whom he follows into the catacombs. Bearing a glimmering
lamp, he passes through a gallery, where the eyes of a row of
corpses, buried upright, glare upon him, into a chasm peopled by
pale, phantom-like forms. He braves the terrors of a blazing
grove and of a dark stream haunted by shrieking spectres, and
finds himself whirled round in chaos like a stone shot in a
sling. Having at length passed safely through the initiation of
Fire, Water and Air, he is welcomed into a valley of "unearthly
sadness," with a bleak, dreary lake lit by a "ghostly glimmer of
sunshine." He gazes with awe on the image of the god Osiris, who
presides over the silent kingdom of the dead. Watching within the
temple of Isis, he suddenly sees before him the priestess,
Alethe, who guides him back to the realms of day. At the close of
the story, after Alethe has been martyred for the Christian
faith, Alciphron himself becomes a Christian.

In _The Epicurean_, Moore shows a remarkable power of describing
scenes of gloo