“Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost?  The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins.  Foolish Doctor!  Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself?  The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side.  Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes:  what else was he, what else are we?  Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility?  This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact:  we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons.  Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls?  And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,—­till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?  Where now is Alexander of Macedon:  does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must?  Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns!  Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?—­ Ghosts!  There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.

“O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!  These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion?  They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME:  wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.  That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart:  but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more.  Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance:  fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet’s sounding.  Plummet’s?  Fantasy herself will not follow them.  A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not.