never
some commonplace truth or plausibility protruded from the general
washiness, it was seized upon and beaten and stretched to the last
degree of tenuity. Phrases upon phrases of gorgeous dreaminess. A
soothing delight,--yet such delight as only the bodily senses demanded.
A joyful deliverance from the bondage of intellectual life. Hints that
our human consciousness of sin was a vain delusion from which the
"developed" man was happily delivered. "Come up here," said the
preacher, in substance, "and escape from this moral accountability which
sits so heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and
debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal
taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods
of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe."

An hour--two hours--passed. The air was thick and poisonous. Attention
had been strained to the utmost. Other things were to be noted by those
accustomed to regard mental disorder from a physiological point of view.

And now, by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker
won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton
had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic
power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences
groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time
it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium or
his audience might be stimulated into specious blossom. Phenomena were
exhibited which transcended the conscious powers of the human
soul,--nay, which testified of its latent ability to work without
organic conditions. Our unemployed brain-organs, as Hamilton and others
have clearly proved, are always employing themselves. And from this
self-employment--or was it demon-employment?--there swept through the
consciousness a vague delirium of excitement. In all that assembly a
single pulse beat feverish measures. The climax was reached. Without was
the soft spring night veiling the scarcely touched range of knowledge
and beauty offered to the healthy energies of man; within were dazed
wanderers in a region of morbid emotion, seeking to intensify the colors
of Nature, willing to waste precious vitality in conjurations of the
dead.

The wretched thraldom was over,--and what had it left?

An exquisite sensitiveness of the nerves of sense, imagination exalted,
memory goaded, reason and jud