you would have us snowed upon with poppies till we sleep and forget these things.  I, on the contrary, would have our eyes wide open, our senses ‘all attentive,’ our souls lifted in reverential expectation.  Every fact is a word of God, and I call it irreligious to say, ‘I will deny this because it displeases me.’  ’I will look away from that because it will do me harm.’  Why be afraid of the truth?  God is in the truth, and He is called also Love.  The evil results of certain experiences of this class result mainly from the superstitions and distorted views held by most people concerning the spiritual world.  We have to learn—­we in the body—­that Death does not teach all things.  Death is simply an accident.  Foolish Jack Smith who died on Monday, is on Tuesday still foolish Jack Smith.  If people who on Monday scorned his opinions prudently, will on Tuesday receive his least words as oracles, they very naturally may go mad, or at least do something as foolish as their inspirer is.  Also, it is no argument against any subject, that it drives people mad who suffer themselves to be absorbed in it.  That would be an argument against all religion, and all love, by your leave.  Ask the Commissioners of Lunacy; knock at the door of mad-houses in general, and inquire what two causes act almost universally in filling them.  Answer—­love and religion.  The common objection of the degradation of knocking with the leg of the table, and the ridicule of the position for a spirit, &c., &c., I don’t enter into at all.  Twice I have been present at table-experiments, and each time I was deeply impressed—­impressed, there’s the word for it!  The panting and shivering of that dead dumb wood, the human emotion conveyed through it—­by what? had to me a greater significance than the St. Peter’s of this Rome.  O poet! do you not know that poetry is not confined to the clipped alleys, no, nor to the blue tops of ‘Parnassus hill’?  Poetry is where we live and have our being—­wherever God works and man understands.  Hein! ... if you are in a dungeon and a friend knocks through the outer wall, spelling out by knocks the words you comprehend; you don’t think the worse of the friend standing in the sun who remembers you.  He is not degraded by it, you rather think.  Now apply this.  Certainly, there is a reaction from the materialism of the age, and this is certainly well, in my mind, but then there is something more than this, more than a mere human reaction, I believe.  I have not the power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my hand—­a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to make words or letters even.

We see a good deal of Fanny Kemble, a noble creature, and hear her sister sing—­Mrs. Sartoris.  Do admit a little society.  It is good for soul and body, and on the Continent it is easy to get a handful of society without paying too dear for it.  That, I think, is an advantage of Continental life.