my eyes.  Now, sir, you are much older; you have scaled the dizzy heights of science and carefully explored the mines of philosophy; and if human learning will avail, then you can help me.  It is impossible for you to have lived and studied so long without arriving at some conclusion relative to these vexing questions of this and every other age.  I want to know whether I have ever lived before; whether there is not an anterior life of my soul, of which I get occasional glimpses, and the memory of which haunts and disquiets me.  This doubt has not been engendered by casual allusions to Plato’s ‘reminiscence theory’; before I knew there was such a doctrine in existence I have sat by your study fire, pondering some strange coincidences for which I could not account.  It seemed an indistinct outgoing into the far past; a dim recollection of scenes and ideas, older than the aggregate of my birthdays; now a flickering light, then all darkness; no clew; all shrouded in the mystery of voiceless ages.  I tried to explain these psychological phenomena by the theory of association of ideas, but they eluded an analysis; there was no chain along which memory can pass.  They were like ignes fatui, flashing up from dank caverns and dying out while I looked upon them.  As I grew older I found strange confirmation in those curious passages of Coleridge and Wordsworth, [Footnote:  Coleridge’s “Sonnet on the Birth of a Son.”  Wordsworth’s “Ode—­Intimations of Immortality.”] and continually I propound to my soul these questions:  ’If you are immortal, and will exist through endless ages, have you not existed from the beginning of time?  Immortality knows neither commencement nor ending.  If so, whither shall I go when this material framework is dissolved? to make other frameworks? to a final rest?  Or shall the I, the me, the soul, lose its former identity?  Am I a minute constituent of the all-diffused, all-pervading Spirit, a breath of the Infinite Essence, one day to be divested of my individuality? or is God an awful, gigantic, immutable, isolated Personality?  If so, what medium of communication is afforded?  Can the spiritual commune with matter?  Can the material take cognizance of the purely spiritual and divine?’ Oh, sir!  I know that you do not accept the holy men of Galilee as His deputed oracles.  Tell me where you find surer prophets.  Only show me the truth—­the eternal truth, and I would give my life for it!  Sir, how can you smile at such questions as these—­questions involving the soul’s destiny?  One might fancy you a second Parrhasius.”

She drew back a step or two and regarded him anxiously, nay, pleadingly, as though he held the key to the Temple of Truth, and would not suffer her to pass the portal.  A sarcastic smile lighted his Apollo-like face, as he answered: 

“There is more truth in your metaphor than you imagined; a la Parrhasius, I do see you, a tortured Prometheus, chained by links of your own forging to the Caucasus of Atheism.  But listen to—­”