snore in their boxes.  Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in the Condemned Cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and blood-shot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning.  Six men are to be hanged on the morrow:  comes no hammering from the Rabenstein?—­their gallows must even now be o’ building.  Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us in horizontal positions; their heads all in night-caps and full of the foolishest dreams.  Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten.—­All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them;—­crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel;—­or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed Vipers, each struggling to get its head above the other:  such work goes on under that smoke-counterpane!—­But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars.”

GHOSTS.

[From the Same.]

Again, could any thing 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 around 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....