“Zenobia, when I last saw her,” he answered, “was at Blithedale.”

He said no more.  But there was a great deal of talk going on near me, among a knot of people who might be considered as representing the mysticism, or rather the mystic sensuality, of this singular age.  The nature of the exhibition that was about to take place had probably given the turn to their conversation.

I heard, from a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor to receive them into the category of established facts.  He cited instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong love of years melted away like a vapor.  At the bidding of one of these wizards, the maiden, with her lover’s kiss still burning on her lips, would turn from him with icy indifference; the newly made widow would dig up her buried heart out of her young husband’s grave before the sods had taken root upon it; a mother with her babe’s milk in her bosom would thrust away her child.  Human character was but soft wax in his hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see fit to mould it.  The religious sentiment was a flame which he could blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.  It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present life debased, and that the idea of man’s eternal responsibility was made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not worth acceptance.  But I would have perished on the spot sooner than believe it.

The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in their train,—­such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on jew’s-harps,—­ had not yet arrived.  Alas, my countrymen, methinks we have fallen on an evil age!  If these phenomena have not humbug at the bottom, so much the worse for us.  What can they indicate, in a spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower point than it has ever before reached while incarnate?  We are pursuing a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and evil lives, has degraded below humanity!  To hold intercourse with spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more vile than earthly dust.  These goblins, if they exist at all, are but the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition, dwindling gradually into nothingness.  The less we have to say to them the better, lest we share their fate!