earth was created from right-angled triangles, of which two of the sides are equal.  The sphere and the pyramid contain in themselves the figure of fire; but the octaedron was destined to be the figure of air, and the icosaedron of water.  The right-angled isosceles triangle produces from itself a square, andthe square generates from itself the cube, which is the figure peculiar to earth.  But the figure of a beautiful and perfect sphere was imparted to the most beautiful and perfect world, that it might be indigent of nothing, but contain all things, embracing and comprehending them in itself, and thus might be excellent and admirable, similar to and in concord with itself, ever moving musically and melodiously.  If I use a novel language, excuse me.  As Apuleius says, pardon must be granted to novelty of words, when it serves to illustrate the obscurity of things.”

These words came from the lips of the lion-like philosopher, who has been noticed before in these pages.  He was sitting with Flemming, smoking a long pipe.  As the Baron said, he was indeed a strange owl; for the owl is a grave bird; a monk, who chants midnight mass in the great temple of Nature;—­an anchorite,—­a pillar saint,—­the very Simeon Stylites of his neighbourhood.  Such, likewise, was the philosophical Professor.  Solitary, but with a mighty current, flowed the river of his life, like the Nile, without a tributary stream, and making fertile only a single strip in the vast desert.  His temperament had been in youth a joyous one; and now, amid all his sorrows and privations, for he had many, he looked upon the world as a glad, bright, glorious world.  On the many joys of life he gazed still with the eyes of childhood, from the far-gone Past upward, trusting, hoping;—­and upon its sorrows with the eyes of age, from the distant Future, downward, triumphant, not despairing.  He loved solitude, and silence, and candle-light, and the deep midnight.  “For,” said he, “if the morning hours are the wings of the day, I only fold them about me to sleep more sweetly; knowing that, at its other extremity, the day, like the fowls of the air, has an epicurean morsel,—­a parson’s nose; and on this oily midnight my spirit revels and is glad.”

Such was the Professor, who had been talking in a half-intelligible strain for two hours or more.  The Baron had fallen fast asleep in his chair; but Flemming sat listening with excited imagination, and the Professor continued in the following words, which, to the best of his listener’s memory, seemed gleaned here and there from Fichte’s Destiny of Man, and Shubert’s History of the Soul.