call it sympathy, how shall we define those mysterious premonitions, shadowy warnings, solemn foretokens, that fall upon us now and then as the dew falls upon the grass-leaf, that make our blood to shiver and our flesh to quake, and will not by any means permit themselves to be passed by or nullified?  ’T is a fact that is irrepressible; and, in persons with imagination of morbid tendency, this spontaneous sympathy takes a hold so strong as to present visibly the image about which there is concern,—­and, behold! your veritable spectre is begotten!  So, again, of your ‘love at first sight,’ comme on dit,—­that inevitable attraction which one person exerts towards another, in spite, it may be, both of reason and judgment.  If this be not child of sympathy, what parentage shall we assign it?  And antipathy, Monsieur, the medal’s reverse,—­your bete noire, for instance,—­expound me that!  Why do you so shudder at sight of this or that innocent object?  You cannot reason it away,—­’t is always there; you cannot explain it, nor diagnose its symptoms,—­’t is a part of you, governed by the same laws that govern your ’elective affinities’ throughout.  But note, Monsieur!  You and I and man in general are not alone in this:  the whole organic world—­nay, some say the entire universe, inorganic as well as organic—­is subject to these impalpable sympathetic forces.  Is the hypothesis altogether fanciful of chemical election and rejection,—­of the kiss and the kick of the magnet?  Your Sensitive-Plant, your Dionea, your Rose of Jericho, your Orinoco-blossom that sets itself afloat in superb faith that the ever-moving waters will bring it to meet its mate and lover,—­are not these instances of sympathy?  And tell me by what means your eye conquers the furious dog that would bite you,—­tell me how that dog is able to follow your traces, and to find the quail or the fox for you,—­tell me how the cat chills the bird it would spring upon,—­how the serpent fascinates its victim with a flash of its glittering eye.  Our ‘dumb beasts’ yet have a language of their own, unguessed of us, yet perfectly intelligible to them,—­how?  We call this, Instinct. Eh, bien, Monsieur! what is Instinct, but Sympathy?

“Bah! it amounts to nothing, all this, if we only look at it in such relations.  For centuries have stupides bothered their brains about such matters, seeking to account for them.  As well devote one’s time to puzzling over ‘Aelia Laelia’!  Mysteries were not meant to be put in the spelling-books, Monsieur.  Ah, bah! a far different path did Cesar Prevost pursue!  He studied these phenomena, not to explain them,—­being too wise to dream of living par amours with such barren virgins as are Whence and Why (your Bacon was very shrewd, Monsieur).  What cared I about causes?  Let Descartes, and Polignac, and Reid, and Cudworth, et id omne genus, famish themselves in this desert; but ask it not of Cesar Prevost!  He is always considerate