One night, filled with this intolerable pain, as he passed through the streets he yielded to the temptation to kill out this torturing consciousness:  he accosted one of the women of the streets and walked away with her.  She was full of light prattle, and chattered on and on.  Harvey answered her not a word; he was set on his stony purpose.  Child of the Stars! what had he to do with these things?  He sought only his soul’s annihilation.  Something in this terrible silence communicated itself to his companion.  She looked at his face in the light of a lamp; it was white, locked, and rigid.  Child of the Stars, no less, though long forgetful, she shuddered at this association.  She recoiled from him crying out “You brute—­you brute!” and then fled away.  The unhappy man turned homeward and sat in his lonely room with stupid, staring eyes, fixed on darkness and vacancy until the pale green light of dawn began to creep in upon him.

Into this fevered and anguished existence no light had yet come.  Drunken with wretchedness, Harvey could not or would not think; and the implacable spirit which followed him deepened and quickened still more the current of his being, and the gloom and the glory of his dream moved still nearer to each other.  Mighty and mysterious spirit, thou who crownest pain with beauty, and by whom the mighty are bowed down from their seats, under they guidance, for such a crowning and for such agony, were coiled together the living streams of evil and good, so that at last the man might know himself—­the soul—­not as other than Thee!

The ways by which he was brought to that moment were unremembered; the sensations and thoughts and moods which culminated in the fire of self-consciousness could be retraced but vaguely.  He had gone out of the city one Sunday, and lying down in the fields under the trees, for a time he grew forgetful of misery.  He went once more into the world of dreams.  He, or the creature of his imagination, some shadow of himself, lived in and roamed through antique forests where the wonderful days were unbroken by sense of sorrow.  Childhood shared in an all-pervading exultation; through the pulses of youth ran the fiery energy that quickened the world; and this shadow of the dreamer dwelling amid the forests grew gradually into a consciousness of a fiery life upon which the surface forms were but films:  he entered this kingdom of fire; its life became his life; he knew the secret ways to the sun, and the sunny secrets living in the golden world.  “It was I, myself,” rushed into Harvey’s mind:  “It was I. Ah, how long ago!” Then for the first time, his visions, dreams and imaginations became real to him, as memories of a spirit traveling through time and space.  Looking backwards, he could nowhere find in the small and commonplace surroundings of his life anything which could have suggested or given birth to these vivid pictures and ideas.  They began to move about swiftly in his mind and