the visible outward Sign, be sure that on the morrow Balaam doubts both himself and his ass, Belshazzar and Pharoah call Moses and Daniel to qualify the Word.  The Spirit, descending, bears man above this earth, opens the seas and lets him see their depths, shows him lost species, wakens dry bones whose dust is the soil of valleys; the Apostle writes the Apocalypse, and twenty centuries later human science ratifies his words and turns his visions into maxims.  And what comes of it all?  Why this,—­that the peoples live as they have ever lived, as they lived in the first Olympiad, as they lived on the morrow of Creation, and on the eve of the great cataclysm.  The waves of Doubt have covered all things.  The same floods surge with the same measured motion on the human granite which serves as a boundary to the ocean of intelligence.  When man has inquired of himself whether he has seen that which he has seen, whether he has heard the words that entered his ears, whether the facts were facts and the idea is indeed an idea, then he resumes his wonted bearing, thinks of his worldly interests, obeys some envoy of death and of oblivion whose dusky mantle covers like a pall an ancient Humanity of which the moderns retain no memory.  Man never pauses; he goes his round, he vegetates until the appointed day when his Axe falls.  If this wave force, this pressure of bitter waters prevents all progress, no doubt it also warns of death.  Spirits prepared by faith among the higher souls of earth can alone perceive the mystic ladder of Jacob.

After listening to Seraphita’s answer in which (being earnestly questioned) she unrolled before their eyes a Divine Perspective,—­as an organ fills a church with sonorous sound and reveals a musical universe, its solemn tones rising to the loftiest arches and playing, like light, upon their foliated capitals,—­Wilfrid returned to his own room, awed by the sight of a world in ruins, and on those ruins the brilliance of mysterious lights poured forth in torrents by the hand of a young girl.  On the morrow he still thought of these things, but his awe was gone; he felt he was neither destroyed nor changed; his passions, his ideas awoke in full force, fresh and vigorous.  He went to breakfast with Monsieur Becker and found the old man absorbed in the “Treatise on Incantations,” which he had searched since early morning to convince his guest that there was nothing unprecedented in all that they had seen and heard at the Swedish castle.  With the childlike trustfulness of a true scholar he had folded down the pages in which Jean Wier related authentic facts which proved the possibility of the events that had happened the night before,—­for to learned men an idea is a event, just as the greatest events often present no idea at all to them.  By the time they had swallowed their fifth cup of tea, these philosophers had come to think the mysterious scene of the preceding evening wholly natural.  The celestial truths to which they had listened were arguments susceptible of examination; Seraphita was a girl, more or less eloquent; allowance must be made for the charms of her voice, her seductive beauty, her fascinating motions, in short, for all those oratorical arts by which an actor puts a world of sentiment and thought into phrases which are often commonplace.