he tried me with earthly poverty—­that is, if he were to stint me of life itself—­not give me enough of Himself to live upon—­enough to make existence feel a good.  The fancy grew to a fear, laid hold upon me, and made me miserable.  Suppose, for instance, I said to myself, I were no more to have any larger visitation of thoughts and hopes and aspirations than old Mrs. Bloxam, who sits from morning to night with the same stocking on her needles, and absolutely the same expression, of as near nothing as may be upon human countenance, nor changes whoever speaks to her!”

“She says the Lord is with her,” suggested the draper.

“Well!” rejoined the minister, in a slow, cogitative tone.

“And plainly life is to her worth having,” added the draper.  “Clearly she has as much of life as is necessary to her present stage.”

“You are right.  I have been saying just the same things to myself; and, I trust, when the Lord comes, He will not find me without faith.  But just suppose life were to grow altogether uninteresting!  Suppose certain moods—­such as you, with all your good spirits and blessed temper, must surely sometimes have experienced—­suppose they were to become fixed, and life to seem utterly dull, God nowhere, and your own dreary self, and nothing but that self, everywhere!”

“Let me read you a chapter of St. John,” said the draper.

“Presently I will.  But I am not in the right mood just this moment.  Let me tell you first how I came by my present mood.  Don’t mistake me:  I am not possessed by the idea—­I am only trying to understand its nature, and set a trap fit to catch it, if it should creep into my inner premises, and from an idea swell to a seeming fact.—­Well, I had a strange kind of a vision last night—­no, not a vision—­yes, a kind of vision—­anyhow a very strange experience.  I don’t know whether the draught the doctor gave me—­I wish I had poor Faber back—­this fellow is fitter to doctor oxen and mules than men!—­I don’t know whether the draught had any thing to do with it—­I thought I tasted something sleepy in it—­anyhow, thought is thought, and truth is truth, whatever drug, no less than whatever joy or sorrow, may have been midwife to it.  The first I remember of the mental experience, whatever it may have to be called, is, that I was coming awake—­returning to myself after some period wherein consciousness had been quiescent.  Of place, or time, or circumstance, I knew nothing.  I was only growing aware of being.  I speculated upon nothing.  I did not even say to myself, ’I was dead, and now I am coming alive.’  I only felt.  And I had but one feeling—­and that feeling was love—­the outgoing of a longing heart toward—­I could not tell what;—­toward—­I can not describe the feeling—­toward the only existence there was, and that was every thing;—­toward pure being, not as an abstraction, but as the one actual fact, whence the world, men, and me—­a something I knew only by being myself an existence.