concrete and the unquestioned.  He declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism.  Let me also say this for my friend,—­that his directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have called a religious principle.  He was never guilty of the shallow wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest self-culture only as a state of more passionate yearning for regeneration.

What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble companionship? how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the feasibility of the object he strove to attain?  We read together certain manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in which, wrapt in a gorgeous symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which, at times, could be faintly perceived, but never mastered.  There were hints, apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored to grasp them, vanished like a vision.

Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with Vannelle in the room I have described.  And during that vivid period I knew an intellectual intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of spirit wholly delivered from the burden of the flesh.  Vannelle talked like one inspired upon the higher problems of metaphysical research, showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations of the philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false.  We seemed to have cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it from a position whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable oppressions marked the rhythm in a majestic poem.  The infinite vagaries of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of blessedness, were equally wholesome as equally full of Law.  At times it seemed impossible that any words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the thought which flashed through our minds.  At times a representation corresponding to what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of opinion man had known.  But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and despair analogous to those which succeed physical intoxication.  The grosser systems of antiquity were not only considered, but actually personated in our experience.  Here it was necessary for us to penetrate into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how the noblest virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions.  Yet we learned to welcome these convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly bearing us onward towards our destined goal.

—­But enough of this.  I would only faintly express how terribly real was the delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?) which has overhung my earthly life.