One evening he had lingered alone and late upon the ramparts, watching the stars as, one by one, they broke upon the twilight.  Never had he felt so sensibly the mighty power of the heavens and the earth upon man; how much the springs of our intellectual being are moved and acted upon by the solemn influences of Nature.  As a patient on whom, slowly and by degrees, the agencies of mesmerism are brought to bear, he acknowledged to his heart the growing force of that vast and universal magnetism which is the life of creation, and binds the atom to the whole.  A strange and ineffable consciousness of power, of the something great within the perishable clay, appealed to feelings at once dim and glorious,—­like the faint recognitions of a holier and former being.  An impulse, that he could not resist, led him to seek the mystic.  He would demand, that hour, his initiation into the worlds beyond our world,—­he was prepared to breathe a diviner air.  He entered the castle, and strode the shadowy and starlit gallery which conducted to Mejnour’s apartment.

CHAPTER 4.III.

     Man is the eye of things.—­Euryph, “de Vit.  Hum.”

...There is, therefore, a certain ecstatical or transporting power, which, if at any time it shall be excited or stirred up by an ardent desire and most strong imagination, is able to conduct the spirit of the more outward even to some absent and far-distant object.—­Von Helmont.

The rooms that Mejnour occupied consisted of two chambers communicating with each other, and a third in which he slept.  All these rooms were placed in the huge square tower that beetled over the dark and bush-grown precipice.  The first chamber which Glyndon entered was empty.  With a noiseless step he passed on, and opened the door that admitted into the inner one.  He drew back at the threshold, overpowered by a strong fragrance which filled the chamber:  a kind of mist thickened the air rather than obscured it, for this vapour was not dark, but resembled a snow-cloud moving slowly, and in heavy undulations, wave upon wave regularly over the space.  A mortal cold struck to the Englishman’s heart, and his blood froze.  He stood rooted to the spot; and as his eyes strained involuntarily through the vapour, he fancied (for he could not be sure that it was not the trick of his imagination) that he saw dim, spectre-like, but gigantic forms floating through the mist; or was it not rather the mist itself that formed its vapours fantastically into those moving, impalpable, and bodiless apparitions?  A great painter of antiquity is said, in a picture of Hades, to have represented the monsters that glide through the ghostly River of the Dead, so artfully, that the eye perceived at once that the river itself was but a spectre, and the bloodless things that tenanted it had no life, their forms blending with the dead waters till, as the eye continued to