Chapter XXIV: Introduction (5)

"We both admit that matter and spirit are two separate creations, neither of which contains the other; that the spiritual world consists of infinite relations to which the finite material world gives rise; and that whereas no one on earth has ever been able to identify himself by a sheer effort of mind with the sum-total of earthly creations, all the more certainly can he not rise to an apprehension of the relations which the spirit discerns between these creations. So I might end the matter with one blow by denying you the faculty of understanding God, just as you deny the pebbles by the fiord the faculty of counting or of seeing themselves. How do you know that they may not deny the existence of man, though man uses them to build his house with?

"There is one fact which overthrows you--Infinitude. If you feel it within you, how is it that you do not recognize the consequences? Can the finite fully apprehend the infinite? If you cannot comprehend the relations which, by your own admission, are infinite, how can you comprehend the remote finality in which they are summed up? Order, of which the manifestation is one of your needs, being infinite, can your finite reason comprehend it?

"Nor need you inquire why man cannot comprehend all he can conceive of, for he likewise can conceive of much that he cannot comprehend. If I were to prove to you that your mind is ignorant of everything that lies within its grasp, would you grant me that it is impossible for it to conceive of what lies beyond it? Should I not be justified, then, in saying, 'One of the alternatives which bring God to nought at the bar of your judgment must be true and the other false; Creation exists, you feel the need for an end; must not that end be a noble one? Now, if in man matter is conterminous with intelligence, why can you not be satisfied to grant that human intelligence ends where the light begins of those superior spheres for which is reserved the intuition of the God who, to you, is merely an insoluble problem?

"The species lower than man have no comprehension of the universe; you have. Why should there not be, above man again, species more intelligent than he? Before using his powers to take measure of God, would not man do well to know more about himself? Before defying the stars that give him light, before attacking transcendent truths, ought he not rather to verify the truths that immediately concern him?

"But I should answer the negations of doubt by negation. Well, then, I ask you: Is there here on earth a single thing so self-evident that I am bound to believe in it? I will show you in a minute that you believe firmly in things that can act and yet are not beings, that can give birth to thought and yet are not spirits, in living abstractions which the understanding cannot grasp under any shape, which nowhere exist, but which you can everywhere find; which have no possible names--though you have given them names; which, like the God in human form whom you conceive of, perish before the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, and the absurd. And I will ask you: If you admit these things, why do you reserve your doubts for God?

"You believe in Number as the foundation on which rests the edifice of what you call the exact sciences. Without number mathematics are impossible. Well, then, what impossible being, to whom life everlasting should be granted, could ever finish counting--and in what sufficiently concise language could he utter--the numbers contained in the infinite number of which the existence is demonstrated by your reason. Ask the greatest human genius, and suppose him to sit for a thousand years leaning on a table, his head in his hands, what would he answer?

"You know neither where number begins, where it pauses, nor where it ends. Now you call it time, anon you call it space; by number only does anything exist; but for number all substance would be one and the same; it alone differentiates and modifies matter. Number is to your mind what it is to matter, an intangible agent. But will you then make a god of it? Is it a being? Is it a breath of God sent forth to organize the material universe, wherein nothing takes shape but as a result of divisibility which is an effect of number? The most minute as well as the most immense objects in creation are distinguished from each other by quantity, quality, dimension, and force,--are not these all conditions of number? That number is infinite is a fact proved to your intellect, but of which no material proof is obtainable. A mathematician will tell you that infinity of number is certain, but cannot be demonstrated. And, my dear Pastor, believers will tell you that God is Number endowed with motion, to be felt but not proved. He, like the unit, is the origin of number though having nothing in common with numbers. The existence of Number depends on that of the unit, which is not a number, but the parent of them all. And God, dear Pastor Becker, is a stupendous Unit, having nothing in common with His creations, but their Parent nevertheless.

"You must grant me that you are equally ignorant as to where number begins or ends, and as to where created eternity begins or ends? Why, then, if you believe in number, should you deny God? Does not creation hold a place between the infinite of inorganic substances and the infinite of the Divine spheres, as the unit stands between the infinite of fractions--lately termed decimals--and the infinite numbers you call whole numbers? Men alone on earth comprehend number, the first step to the forecourt leading to God, and even there reason stumbles. What! you can neither measure nor grasp the primary abstraction proposed to you, and you want to apply your puny standard to the ends of God's purpose? What if I should cast you into the bottomless depths of Motion, the force which organizes number?

"If I were to tell you that the universe is nothing but Number and Motion, we should already, you see, be speaking a different language. I understand both terms; you do not. What, then, if I should go on to say that motion and number are generated by the Word? This term, the Supreme Reason of seers and prophets, who of old heard the voice of God that overthrew St. Paul, is a laughing-stock to you--you men, though your own visible works--communities, monuments, actions, and passions--all are the outcome of your own feeble Word; and though without speech you would still be no higher than the Orang of the woods, the great ape that is so nearly akin to the Negro.

"Well, you believe firmly in number and motion, inexplicable and incomprehensible as force and result, though I might apply to their existence the same logical dilemma as just now relieved you of the necessity of acknowledging that of God. You, a powerful reasoner, will surely relieve me of the necessity for proving that the Infinite must be everywhere the same, and that it is inevitably one? God alone is the Infinite, for there obviously cannot be two Infinites. If, to use words in their human sense, anything proved to you here on earth strikes you as infinite, you may be sure you have in that a glimpse of one aspect of God.

"To proceed: you have found for yourselves a place in the Infinite of number; you have fitted it to your stature by creating arithmetic--if you can be said to create anything--the basis on which everything is built up, even society. Arithmetic, or the use of number, has organized the moral world, just as number, the only thing in which your professing Atheists believe, organizes physical creation. This science of numbers ought to be absolute, like everything that is intrinsically true; but it is, in fact, purely relative, it has no absolute existence. You can give no proof of its reality.

"To begin with, though this science is apt at summing up organized substances, it is impotent as applied to organizing forces, since these are infinite, whereas the former are finite. Man, whose intellect can conceive of the Infinite, cannot deal with it as a whole; if he could, he would be God. Hence your arithmetic, as applied to finite things and not to the Infinite, is true in relation to the details you apprehend, but false in relation to the whole which you cannot apprehend. Though nature does not vary in her organizing forces and her elementary causes, which are infinite, she is never the same in her finite results. Hence in all nature you will find no two objects exactly alike.

"Thus, in the order of nature, two and two can never really make four, since the units would have to be exactly equal; and you know that it is impossible to find two leaves alike on one tree, or two specimens alike of the same species of tree. This axiom of arithmetic then, which is false as regards visible nature, is no less false in the invisible nature of your abstractions, where there is the same dissimilarity in your ideas which are derived from the objects of the visible world, only extended in their relations; in fact, differences are even more strongly marked there than elsewhere. Everything there being modified by the temperament, the strength, the manners, and the habits of individuals, who are never alike, the most trifling matters are representative of personal character.

"If man has ever succeeded in creating an unit, it was, no doubt, by assigning equal weight and value to certain pieces of gold. Well, add a rich man's ducat to a poor man's, and tell yourself that to the public treasury these are equal quantities; but in the eyes of a thoughtful man, one, morally speaking, is unquestionably greater than the other; one represents a month's happiness, the other the most transient caprice. Two and two only make four in the sense of a false and monstrous abstraction.

"A fraction, again, has no existence in nature, since what you call a part is a thing complete in itself; and does it not often happen--and have we not proof of the fact--that the hundredth part of some substance may be stronger than what you call the whole? And if a fraction has no existence in the natural world, far less does it exist in the moral world, where ideas and feelings may be as various as the species of the vegetable kingdom, but are always a whole. The theory of fractions, then, is another concession of the mind. Number, with its 'infinitely small' and its 'infinite total,' is a power of which a small part only is known to you, while its extent evades you. You have built a little cottage in the infinitude of number; you have adorned it with hieroglyphics very learnedly designed and painted; and you have said, 'Everything is here!'

"From abstract number we will pass on to number as applied to solids. Your geometry states it as an axiom that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another; and astronomy shows you that God has given motion only in curves. Here, then, in the same science, are two facts equally well proved--one by the evidence of your senses, aided by the telescope; the other by the testimony of your mind; but one contradicts the other. Man, who is liable to error, asserts one, and the Maker of the worlds--whom you have never found in error--contradicts it. Who can decide between rectilinear and curvilinear geometry?--between the theory of straight lines and the theory of curved lines? If, in His work, the mysterious Maker, who attains His ends with miraculous directness, only makes use of the straight line to divide it at a right angle and obtain a curve, man himself cannot rely on it: the bullet a man wishes to send in a straight line follows a curve, and when you want to hit a point in space with certainty you propel the ball on its cruel parabola. Not one of your learned men has arrived at the simple induction that the curved line is that of the material world, and the straight line that of the spiritual world; that one is the theory of finite creation, and the other the theory of the infinite. Man alone--he alone here on earth having any consciousness of the infinite--can know the straight line; he alone, in a special organ, has the sense of the vertical. May not the predilection for curved lines in some men be an indication of the impurity of their nature, still too closely allied to the material substances which engender us? and may not the love for straight lines, seen in lofty minds, be in them a presentiment of heaven? Between these two lines lies a gulf as wide as between the Finite and the Infinite, between Matter and Spirit, between Man and the Idea, between Motion and the Thing moved, between the Creature and God. Borrow the wings of Divine Love and you may cross that gulf. Beyond it the revelation of the Word begins!

"The things you call material are nowhere devoid of thickness; lines are the edges of solids having a power of action which you ignore in your theorems, and that makes them false in relation to bodies regarded as a whole; hence the constant destruction of human works, to which you have unwittingly given active properties. Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws: can you name one to which no fact makes an exception? The laws of statics are contradicted by a thousand incidents in physics; a fluid overthrows the most stupendous mountains, and so proves that the heaviest substances may be upheaved by imponderable agents. Your laws of acoustics and optics are nullified by the sounds you hear in your brain during sleep, and by the light of an electric flash, of which the rays are often overpowering. You do not know how light is brought to your intelligence, any more than you know the simple and natural process by which it is changed to ruby, sapphire, opal, and emerald on the neck of an Indian bird, while it lies dim and gray on the same bird under the misty sky of Europe, nor why it beams perpetually white here in the heart of the polar regions. You cannot tell whether color is a faculty with which bodies are endowed, or an effect produced by the diffusion of light.

"You believe the whole sea to be salt without having ascertained that it is so in its deepest places.

"You recognize the existence of various substances which traverse what you call the Void: substances intangible under any known form assumed by matter, and which meet and combine with it in spite of every obstacle. That being the case, you believe in the results obtained by chemistry, though as yet it knows no method of estimating the changes produced by the currents to and fro of those substances as they pass through your crystals and your instruments on the inappreciable waves of heat or of light, conducted or repelled by the affinities of metals or vitrified flint. You obtain no substances but what are dead, out of which you have driven the unknown force which resists decomposition in all earthly things, the force of which attraction, undulation, cohesion, and polarity are manifestations.

"Life is the mind of body; bodies are but a mode of detaining it, of delaying it in its transit; if bodies were themselves living things, they would be a cause; they would not die. When a man establishes the results of the motion of which every form of creation has its share in proportion to its power of absorbing it, you call him a Learned Man, as though genius consisted in explaining what exists. Genius should lift its eyes above effects. All your learned men would laugh if you should say to them, 'There is a certain connecting relation between two beings, such as that if one of them were here and the other in Java, they might feel the same sensation at the same instant, and be aware of the fact, and question and answer each other without a mistake.' And yet there are some mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far reaching as that of which I speak. You believe in the power of electricity when it is fixed on the lodestone, but you deny it as emanating from the soul. According to you, the moon, whose influence over the tides seems to you proven, has none over the winds, over vegetation, or over men; it can move the sea and eat into glass, but it cannot affect the sick; it has undoubted effects on one-half of the human race; none on the other half. These are your most precious convictions.

"We may go further: You believe in physics; but your physics are based, like the Catholic religion, on an act of faith. Do they not recognize an external force apart from bodies to which it imparts movement? You see its effects, but what is it? Where is it? What is its essence, its life? Has it any limits?----And you deny God!

"Thus most of your scientific axioms, though true in relation to man, are false in relation to the Whole. Science is one, and you have divided it. To know the true sense of the laws of phenomena, would it not be necessary to know the correlations existing between the phenomena and the laws of the whole? There is in all things an appearance, a presentment, which strikes your sense; behind this presentment there is a soul moving--the body, and the faculty. Where are the relations which hold things together studied or taught? Nowhere. Have you, then, no absolute finality? Your best ascertained theses rest on an analysis of the forms of matter, while the spirit is constantly neglected.

"There is a supreme science of which some men--too late--get a glimpse, though they dare not own it. These men perceive the necessity for considering all bodies, not merely from the point of view of their mathematical properties, but also from that of their whole relations and occult affinities.

"The greatest of you all discerned, towards the end of his life, that all things were at the same time cause and effect reciprocally; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated to each other and captive to invisible spheres. He groaned over having tried to establish absolute principles. When counting his worlds, like grains of sand scattered throughout the ether, he explained their connection by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. You hailed that man.--Well, and I tell you that he died in despair. Assuming that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he invented to account for the universe, were absolutely equal, the universe would stand still, and he insisted on motion, though in an undefined direction; but assuming the forces to be unequal, the worlds must at once fall into confusion. Thus his laws were not final; there was another problem still higher than that of attraction, on which his spurious glory was founded. The pull of the stars against each other, and the centripetal tendency of their individual motion, did not hinder him from seeking the branch from which the whole cluster was hanging. Unhappy man; the more he extended space, the heavier was his load. He told you that every part was in equilibrium; but whither was the whole bound?

"He contemplated the space, infinite in the eyes of men, that is filled with the groups of worlds, of which a small number are registered by our telescopes, while its immensity is proved by the rapidity of light. This sublime contemplation gave him a conception of the infinitude of worlds, planted in space like flowers in a meadow, which are born like infants, grow like men, die like old men, which live by assimilating from their atmosphere the substances proper to nourish them, which have a centre and principle of life, which protect themselves from each other by an intervening space, which constitute a grand whole, that has its own life, its own destination.

"At this prospect the man trembled. He knew that life is produced by the union of the Thing with its first Principle; that death, or inertia--or gravitation--is caused by a rupture between the Thing and the motion proper to it; and he thus foresaw the crash of worlds, in ruins if God should withhold His Word. Then he set to work to seek the traces of that Word in the Apocalypse. You all thought him mad. Know this: he strove to earn forgiveness for his genius.

"Wilfrid, you came to request me to resolve equations, to fly on a rain-cloud, to plunge into the fiord and reappear as a swan. If science or miracle were the end of humanity, Moses would have left you a calculus of fluxions; Jesus Christ would have cleared up the dark places of science; His apostles would have told you whence come those immense trains of gas or of fused metals which rush revolving on a nucleus, solidifying as they seek a place in the ether, and are sometimes violently projected within range of a system where they are absorbed by a star, or crash into it by their shock, or dissolve it by the infusion of deadly vapors. St. Paul, instead of bidding you live in God, would have explained to you that nutrition is the secret bond among all creation, and the visible bond among all living animals. In our own day, the greatest miracle would be to square the circle, a problem which you pronounce impossible, but which has no doubt been solved in the progress of worlds by the intersection of some mathematical line, whose curves are apparent to the eye of spirits elevated to the highest spheres.

"Believe me, miracles are within us and not without us. Thus have natural effects been wrought, which the nations deemed to be supernatural. Would not God have been unjust if He had vouchsafed to show His power to some generations, and had refused it to others? The Brazen Rod belongs to all. Neither Moses nor Jacob, neither Zoroaster nor Paul, nor Pythagoras nor Swedenborg, neither the most obscure evangelists nor the most amazing of God's prophets, have been superior to what you might become. Only, nations have their day of faith. If positive science were indeed the end of all human effort, how is it--confess now--that every social community, every great centre to which men gather, is invariably broken up by Providence? If civilization were the final cause of the human species, could intelligence perish? Would it perennially continue to be a purely individual possession?

"The greatness of all the nations that have ever been great has been founded on exceptions: when the exception ceased to be, the power was dead. Would not the Seers, the Prophets, the Evangelists, have laid their hand on science instead of relying on faith; would they not have hammered at your brains rather than have touched your hearts? They all came to drive the nations to God; they all proclaimed the way of life in the simple words which lead to the Heavenly Kingdom; and fired with love and faith, and inspired by the Word which hovers over the nations, compels them, vivifies them, and uplifts them, they never used it for any human end. Your great geniuses, poets, kings, and sages are swallowed up with their towns, and the desert has buried them under a shroud of sand; while the names of these good shepherds still are blessed and survive every catastrophe.

"We can never agree on any point. Gulfs lie between us. You are on the side of darkness, I live in the true light.

"Is this the word you desired of me? I utter it with joy; it may change you. Know, then, that there are sciences of Matter and sciences of the Spirit. Where you see bodies, I see forces tending towards each other by a creative impulse. To me the character of a body is the sign-manual of its first principles and the expression of its properties. These principles give rise to certain affinities which elude you, but which are connected with centres. The different species to which life is distributed are unfailing springs which communicate with each other. Each has its specific function.

"Man is at once cause and effect; he is nourished, but he nourishes in return. When you call God the Creator, you belittle Him. He did not, as you imagine, create plants, animals, and the stars; could He act by such various means? Must He not have proceeded by unity of purpose? He emitted principles which were compelled to develop in accordance with His general laws, and subject to the conditions of their environment.

"In point of fact, all the affinities are bound together by immediate similarities; the life of worlds is attracted to centres by a greedy aspiration, just as you are all driven by hunger to seek nourishment. To give you an instance of affinities linked to similarities: the secondary law on which the creations of your mind rest--music, a celestial art--is the active evidence of this principle: is it not an assemblage of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a condition of the air under compression, dilatation, and repercussion? You know of what the air is composed? Azote, carbon, and oxygen. Since you can produce no sound in a vacuum, it is evident that music and the human voice are the result of organic chemical elements, acting in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your mind, and co-ordinated by means of light, the great foster-mother of this globe; for can you have cogitated on the quantities of nitre deposited by the snows, on the discharge of thunder, on plants which derive from the air the elements they contain, and have failed to conclude that it is the sun that fuses and diffuses the subtle essence which nourishes all things here below? Swedenborg truly said, 'The earth is a man.'

"All your sciences of to-day, which make you so great in your own eyes, are a mere trifle compared with the light that floods the Seer.

"Cease, cease to question me; we speak a different language. I have used yours for once, to throw a flash of faith upon your souls, to cast a corner of my mantle over you, and tempt you away to the glorious regions of prayer. Is it God's part to stoop to you? Is it not yours rather to rise to Him? If human reason has so soon exhausted the limits of its powers merely by laying God out to prove His existence, without succeeding in doing so, is it not evident that it must seek some other way of knowing Him? That other way is in ourselves. The Seer and the believer have within themselves eyes more piercing than are those eyes which are bent on things of earth, and they discern a dawn.

"Understand this saying: Your most exact sciences, your boldest speculations, your brightest flashes of light, are but clouds. Above them all is the sanctuary whence the true Light is shed."

She sat down and was silent; and her calm features betrayed not the least sign of the trepidation which commonly disturbs an orator after his least inflamed speech.

Wilfrid whispered into the pastor's ear, leaning over him to do so:

"Who told her all this?"

"I do not know," was the reply.

"He was milder on the Falberg," Minna remarked.

Seraphita passed her hands over her eyes, and said with a smile:

"You are very pensive this evening, gentlemen. You treat me and Minna like men to whom you would talk politics or discuss trade, while we are but girls to whom you should tell fairy-tales while drinking tea, as is the custom in our evenings in Norway.--Come, Pastor Becker, tell me some Saga which I do not know. That of Frithiof, in which you believe, and which you promised to tell me, or the story of the peasant's son who has a ship that speaks and has a soul? I dream of the frigate _Ellida_. Is it not on that fairy vessel that girls should sail the seas?"

"Since we have come down to Jarvis again," said Wilfrid, whose eyes were fixed on Seraphita as those of a robber hidden in the gloom are fixed on the spot where treasure lies, "tell me why you do not marry?"

"You are all born widowers or widows," replied she. "My marriage was decided on at my birth; I am betrothed----"

"To whom?" they all asked in a breath.

"Allow me to keep my secret," said she. "I promise, if our father will grant it, to invite you to that mysterious wedding."

"Is it to be soon?"

"I am waiting."

A long silence ensued.

"The spring is come," said Seraphita. "The noise of waters and of breaking ice has begun; will you not come to hail the first springtime of the new century?"

She rose and, followed by Wilfrid, went to a window which David had thrown open. After the long stillness of winter, the vast waters were stirring beneath the ice, and sang through the fiord like music; for there are sounds which distance glorifies, and which reach the ear in waves that seem to bring refreshment and light.

"Cease, Wilfrid," said she, "cease to cherish evil thoughts whose triumph will be a torment to endure. Who could fail to read your wishes in the sparkle of your eyes? Be good; take a step in well-doing! Is it not a step beyond the mere love of men to sacrifice yourself entirely to the happiness of the one you love? Submit to me, and I will lead you into a path where you will attain to all the greatness you dream of, and where love will be really infinite."

She left Wilfrid lost in thought.

"Can this gentle creature really be the prophetess who but now flashed lightnings from her eyes, whose words thundered about the worlds, whose hand wielded the axe of Doubt in defiance of our sciences?" said he to himself. "Have we been asleep for these few minutes?"

"Minna," said Seraphitus, returning to the pastor's daughter, "the eagles gather where the dead lie, the turtle-dove flies to the springs of living water under green and peaceful groves. The eagle soars to the skies, the dove descends from them. Venture no more into regions where you will find neither fountains nor shade. If this morning you could not look into the gulf without destruction, keep your powers for him who will love you. Go, poor child, I am betrothed, as you know."

Minna rose and went with Seraphitus to the window, where Wilfrid still was standing. They could all three hear the Sieg leaping under the force of the upper waters, which were bringing down the trees that had been frozen into the ice. The fiord had found its voice again. Illusion was over. They wondered at Nature bursting her bonds, and answering in noble harmonies to the Spirit whose call had awakened her.

When the three guests had left this mysterious being, they were filled with an indefinable feeling which was not sleep, nor torpor, nor astonishment, but a mixture of all three, which was neither twilight nor daybreak, but which made them long for light. They were all very thoughtful.

"I begin to think that she is a spirit veiled in human form," said the pastor.

Wilfrid, in his own room again, calmed and convinced, knew not how to contend with powers so divinely majestic.

Minna said to herself:

"Why will he not allow me to love him?"

V

THE FAREWELL

There is in man a phenomenon which is the despair of those reflective minds who endeavor to find some meaning in the march of social vicissitudes, and to formulate some laws of progress for the movement of intellect. However serious a fact may be, or, if supernatural facts could exist, however magnificent a miracle could be, publicly performed, the lightning flash of the fact, the thunderbolt of the miracle would be lost in the moral ocean, and the surface, rippled for an instant by some slight ebullition, would at once resume the level of its ordinary swell.

Does the Voice, to be more surely heeded, pass through an animal's jaws? Does the Hand write in strange characters on the cornice of the hall where the Court is reveling? Does the Eye light up the King's slumbers? Does the Prophet read the dream? Does Death, when summoned, stand in the luminous space where a man's faculties revive? Does the Spirit crush matter at the foot of the mystical ladder of the seven spiritual worlds hung one above another in space, and seen by the floods of light that fall in cascades down the steps of the heavenly floor? Still, however deep the inner revelation, however distinct the outward sign, by the morrow Balaam doubts both his ass and himself; Belteshazzar and Pharaoh call in seers to explain the sign--Daniel or Moses.

The Spirit descends, snatches a man above the earth, opens the seas and shows him the bottom of them, calls up vanished generations, gives life to the dry bones thickly strewn in the great valley; the Apostle writes the _Apocalypse_; and twenty centuries later human science confirms the Apostle and translates his figures of speech into axioms. What difference does it make? The mass of people live to-day as they lived yesterday, as they lived in the first Olympiad, as they lived the first day after creation, and on the eve of the great cataclysm. Doubt drowns everything in its waters. The same waves beat, with the self-same ebb and flow, on the human granite that hems in the sea of intellect.

Man asks himself whether indeed he saw what he saw, whether he really heard the words that were spoken, whether the fact was a fact, and the idea really an idea; and then he goes on his way, he thinks of his business, he obeys the inevitable servitor of Death--Forgetfulness, who throws his black cloak over the old humanity of which the younger has no remembrance. Man never ceases to move, to go on, to grow as a vegetable grows, till the day when the axe falls. If this flood-like force, this mounting pressure of bitter waters, hinders all progress, it also, no doubt, is a warning of death. None but the loftier spirits open to faith can discern Jacob's mystical stair.

After listening to the reply in which Seraphita, being so urgently questioned, had unrolled the divine scroll, as an organ fills a church with its roar, and shows the power of the musical universe by flooding the most inaccessible vaults with its solemn notes, playing, like light, among the frail wreaths of the capitals, Wilfrid went home, appalled at having seen the world in ruins, and, above the ruins, a light unknown, shed by the hand of that young creature.

On the following day he was still thinking of it, but his terrors were allayed; he was not in ruins, nor even changed--his passions and ideas woke up fresh and vigorous.

He went to breakfast with the Minister, and found him lost in the study of Jean Wier's treatise, which he had been looking through that morning to be able to reassure his visitor. With the childlike simplicity of a sage, the pastor had turned down the leaves at some pages where Jean Wier adduced authentic evidence demonstrating the possibility of such things as had happened the day before; for to the learned an idea is an event, whereas the greatest events are to them hardly an idea.

By the time these two philosophers had swallowed their fifth cup of tea, that mystical evening seemed quite natural. The heavenly truths were more or less substantial arguments, and open to discussion. Seraphita was a more or less eloquent girl; allowance must be made for her exquisite voice, her enchanting beauty, her fascinating manner, all the oratorical skill by which an actor can put a world of feelings and ideas into a sentence which in itself is often quite commonplace.

"Pooh!" said the good minister, with a little philosophical grimace, as he spread a slice of bread with salt butter, "the answer to all these riddles is six feet beneath the mould!"

"At the same time," said Wilfrid, sugaring his tea, "I cannot understand how a girl of sixteen can know so many things; for she squeezed everything into her speech as if it were in a vise."

"But only read the story of the Italian girl who, at twelve years old, could speak forty-two languages, ancient and modern," said the pastor. "And again, that of the monk who read thought by smell. These are in Jean Wier, and in a dozen other treatises which I will give you to read, a thousand proofs rather than one."

"I daresay, my dear Pastor; but Seraphita remains to me a wife it would be divine joy to possess."

"She is all intellect," replied the minister dubiously.

Some days passed by, during which the snow in the valleys insensibly melted away; the greenery of the forests peeped through like a fresh growth; Norwegian nature made itself beautiful in anticipation of its brief bridal day. All this time, though the milder temperature allowed of open-air exercise, Seraphita remained in solitary seclusion. Thus Wilfrid's passion was enhanced by the aggravating vicinity of the girl he loved, and who refused to be seen. When the inscrutable being admitted Minna, Minna could detect the symptoms of an inward fever; Seraphita's voice was hollow, and her complexion was wan; whereas hitherto its transparency might have been compared by a poet to that of the diamond, it now had the sheen of the topaz.

"Have you seen her?" asked Wilfrid, who had prowled round the house, awaiting Minna's return.

"We shall lose him!" said the girl, her eyes filling with tears.

"Do not try to fool me!" cried the stranger, controlling the vehemence of tone that expressed his fury. "You can only love Seraphita as one girl loves another, not with such love as I feel for her. You cannot conceive what peril you would be in if there were anything to alarm my jealousy.--Why can I not go to see her? Is it you who raise difficulties?"

"I cannot think," said Minna, calm on the surface, but quaking with mortal terror, "what right you have to sound the depths of my heart.--Yes, I love him," she went on, summoning the courage of conviction to confess the faith of her soul. "But my jealousy, though natural to love, fears nobody here. Alas! What I am jealous of is some unconfessed feeling in which he is absorbed. Between him and me lies a space I can never abridge. I want to know whether the stars love him more than I, whether they or I would be the more eagerly devoted to his happiness? Why, why, should I not be free to declare my affection? In the presence of death we may all confess our attachment--and Seraphitus is dying."

"Minna, indeed you are under a mistake; the siren round whom my desires have so often hovered, who allows me to admire her as she reclines on her couch, so graceful, fragile, and suffering, is not a man."

"Nay," replied Minna, in some agitation, "he whose powerful hand guided me over the Falberg to the soeter under the shelter of the Ice-cap up there"--and she pointed to the peak--"is certainly not a mere, weak girl. If you had but heard her prophesy! Her poetry is the music of thought. No young girl could have had the solemn depth of voice which stirred my soul."

"What certainty have you----?" Wilfrid began.

"None but that of my heart!" replied Minna in confusion, and hastily interrupting the speaker.

"Well, but I," cried Wilfrid, with a terrible glance of murderous eagerness and desire, "I, who know what the extent of her power is over me--I will prove your mistake."

At this moment, when words were rushing to Wilfrid's tongue as vehemently as ideas in his head, he saw Seraphita come out of the Swedish Castle, followed by David. The sight of her soothed his effervescent state.

"Look," said he; "none but a woman can have that grace and languor."

"He is ill; it is his last walk!" said Minna.

At a sign from his mistress, David left her, and she advanced towards Wilfrid and Minna.

"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," said the mysterious being; it was the wish of a sufferer which all hasten to accede to.

A thin, white haze hung over the heights and dales of the fiord, and the peaks, glittering like stars, pierced above it, giving it the effect of a milky way moving onwards. Through this earth-born vapor the sun was visible as a globe of red-hot iron. In spite of these last freaks of winter, gusts of mild air, bringing the scent of the birch-trees, already covered with their yellow flowers, and the rich perfume exhaled by the larches, whose silky tufts were all displayed--breezes warm with the incense and the breathing of the earth testified to the exquisite springtime of Northern lands, the brief rapture of a most melancholy nature.

The wind was beginning to roll away the veil of mist that hardly hid the view of the gulf. The birds were singing.

Where the sun had not dried off the frost that trickled down the road in murmuring rills, the bark of the trees was pleasing to the eye by its fantastic appearance.

They all three went along the strand in silence. Wilfrid and Minna were lost in contemplation of the magical scene after their long endurance of the monotonous winter landscape. Their companion was pensive, and walked as though trying to distinguish one voice in the concert. They reached the rocks between which the Sieg tumbles, at the end of the long avenue of ancient fir-trees which the torrent had cut in meandering through the forest, a path covered in by a groined arch of boughs, meeting like those of a cathedral. From thence the whole of the fiord was seen, and the sea sparkled on the horizon like a steel blade. At this instant the clouds vanished, showing the blue sky. Down in the hollows and round the trees the air was full of floating sparkles, the diamond dust swept up by a light breeze, and dazzling gems of drops were hanging at the tip of the branches of each pyramid. The torrent was rolling below; a smoke came up from the surface, tinted in the sunshine with every hue of light; its beams, decomposed, displayed perfect rainbows of the seven colors, like the play of a thousand prisms meeting and crossing there. This wild shore was curtained with various kinds of lichen, a rich web, sheeny with moisture, like some gorgeous hanging of silk. Heath, already in blossom, crowned the rocks with flowers in skilful disorder. All this stirring foliage, tempted by the living waters, hung their heads over it like hair; the larches waved their lace-like arms, as if caressing the pines, that stood rigid like careworn old men.

This luxuriant display was a contrast to the solemnity of the antique colonnades of the forests, range upon range on the hillside, and to the broad sheet of the fiord, in which the torrent drowned its fury at the feet of the three spectators. Beyond it all, the open sea closed in this picture, traced by the greatest of poets--Chance--to which we owe the medley beauty of creation when left, as it would seem, to itself. Jarvis was a speck almost lost in this landscape, in this immensity--sublime, as everything is, which, having but a brief existence, offers a transient image of perfection; for by a law, fatal only to our sight, creations that appear perfect, the delight of our heart and of our eyes, have but one spring to live here.

At the top of that cliff these three beings might easily fancy themselves alone in all the world.

"How exquisite!" exclaimed Wilfrid.

"Nature sings its hymns," said Seraphita. "Is not this music delicious? Confess now, Wilfrid, no woman you ever knew could create for herself so magnificent a retreat. Here I experience a feeling that the sight of great cities rarely inspires, and which makes me long to remain here, lying among these grasses of such rapid growth. Then, with my eyes on the sky, my heart laid bare, lost in the sense of immensity, I could let myself listen to the sighs of the flower, which, scarcely released from its primitive nature, would fain run about; and to the cries of the eider, aggrieved at having only wings, while I thought of the cravings of man, who has something of everything, and who also is for ever full of desires!--But this, Wilfrid, is a woman's poetic fancy! You can find a voluptuous thought in that hazy expanse of water; in those fantastic veils, behind which nature plays like some coquettish bride; and in this atmosphere, where she perfumes her green hair for her bridal. You would fain see the form of a naiad in that wreath of mist, and I, as you think, ought to hear a manly voice in the torrent."

"And is not love in it all, like a bee in a flower?" replied Wilfrid, who, seeing in her for the first time some trace of earthly feeling, thought it a favorable moment for the expression of his fervent affection.

"Always the same?" said Seraphita, laughing, Minna having left them; the girl was climbing a crag where she had seen some blue saxifrages.

"Always!" exclaimed Wilfrid. "Listen," he said, with an imperious glance that met a panoply of adamant, "you know not who I am, nor what my power is, nor what I demand. Do not reject my last entreaty. Be mine, for the sake of the world within your heart! Be mine, that my conscience may be pure, that a heavenly voice may sound in my ears and inspire me aright in the undertaking I have vowed to carry out, impelled by my hatred of the nations, but to be achieved for their welfare if only you are with me. What nobler mission may a woman dream of?--I came to these lands meditating a great scheme."

"And you are prepared to sacrifice it and its glories," said she, "to a very simple girl, whom you will love, and who will guide you into a peaceful path?"

"What do I care? I only want you! This is my secret," he replied, going on with his speech. "I have traveled all over the North, the great workshop where the new races are produced who overspread the earth like floods of humanity sent forth to renew worn-out civilization. I wanted to have begun my work on one of these points, conquering there the ascendency that force and intellect can assert over a small race; to have trained it to battle, to have declared war, and have sent it raging like a conflagration to consume Europe, while shouting to these 'Liberty!' to those 'Plunder!' to some 'Glory!' to others 'Pleasure!' I, standing meanwhile like the image of Fate, pitiless and cruel, moving like the storm which assimilates from the atmosphere the atoms of which the lightning is compounded, and feeding on men like a rapacious monster. I should then have conquered Europe; she is now at a period when she looks for the coming of the new Messiah, who is to devastate the world and to reform the nations. Europe can believe in no one but Him who will trample her under foot.

"Some day historians and poets would have justified my existence, have magnified me, have ascribed great ideas to me--to me, to whom this huge pleasantry, written in blood, is but revenge.

"But, dear Seraphita, what I have seen has disgusted me with the North; force here is too blind, and I crave for the Indies. A duel with a selfish, cowardly, and mercenary government fascinates me more. Besides, it is easier to arouse the imagination of the races that dwell at the foot of Caucasus than to convince the minds of men in these frozen lands. I am tempted to cross the Russian steppes, to reach the frontiers of Asia, to cover it as far as the Ganges with my victorious flood of human beings, and then I shall overthrow the English rule. Seven men, at different periods, have already carried out such a scheme. I shall renew Art, as the Saracens did when Mahomet cast them over Europe. I will not be so sordid a king as those who now govern the ancient provinces of the Roman Empire, quarreling with their subjects over custom-house dues. No, nothing shall arrest the flash of my gaze or the storm of my speech! My feet, like those of Genghis Khan, shall cover a third of the globe; my hand shall grasp Asia as did that of Aurung Zeeb.

"Be my partner; take your seat, fair and lovely being, on a throne. I have never doubted my success, but with you to dwell in my heart, I should be certain of it."

"I have reigned already," said Seraphita.

The words were like the blow dealt by the axe of a skilful woodsman at the root of a sapling, felling it at once. Men alone can know what a storm a woman can rouse in a man's soul when he has been trying to impress her with his strength or his power, his intellect or his superiority, and the capricious fair nods her head and says, "Oh, that is nothing!" or, with a bored smile, observes, "I know all that," when power is as nought to her.

"What!" cried Wilfrid in despair, "the riches of Art, the wealth of the world, the splendor of a court----"

She checked him by a mere curl of her lips, and said:

"Beings more powerful than you are have offered me more."

"Well, have you no soul, then, that you are not fascinated by the prospect of consoling a great man who will sacrifice everything to dwell with you in a little home by the side of a lake?"

"Why," said she, "I am loved with a boundless love."

"By whom?" cried Wilfrid, going towards Seraphita with a frenzied gesture, as if to fling her into the foaming falls of the Sieg.

She looked at him; his arm dropped; and she pointed to Minna, who came running down, all rose and white, and as pretty as the flowers she carried in her hand.

"My child!" said Seraphitus, going forward to meet her.

Wilfrid stood on the edge of the cliff as motionless as a statue, lost in thought, longing to cast himself into the flow of the torrent, like one of the fallen trees that passed under his eyes and vanished in the abyss beneath.

"I gathered them for you," said Minna, giving the nose-gay to the being she adored. "One of them--this one," said she, picking out a particular blossom, "is like the flower we gathered on the Falberg."

Seraphitus looked at the blossom and then at Minna.

"Why do you question me thus? Do you doubt me?"

"No," said the girl, "my confidence in you is unbounded. While you are far more beautiful to me than this beautiful scenery, you also seem to me to be superior in intelligence to all the rest of humanity. When I have been with you, I seem to have communed with God. I only wish----"

"What?" asked Seraphitus, with a flashing look that revealed to the girl the vast distance that divided them.

"I wish I could suffer in your stead."

"This is the most dangerous of Thy creatures," thought Seraphitus. "Is it a criminal thought, O God, to long to present her to Thee?--Have you forgotten," he said aloud, "all I told you up there?" and he pointed upwards to the peak of the Ice-cap.

"Now he is terrible again!" thought Minna with a shudder.

The roar of the Sieg formed an accompaniment to the thoughts of these three beings, who stood together for a few minutes on a projecting slab of rock, parted, as they were, by immeasurable gulfs in the spiritual world.

"Teach me then, Seraphitus," said Minna, in a voice as silvery as a pearl and as gentle as the movements of a sensitive plant. "Teach me what I must do to avoid loving you? Who could fail to admire you? And love is the admiration that is never tired."

"Poor child!" said Seraphitus, turning pale, "only one Being can be loved thus."

"Who is that?" asked Minna.

"You shall know!" was the reply in the weak voice of one who lies down to die.

"Help! He is dying!" cried Minna.

Wilfrid hastened forward, and seeing this being reclining gracefully on a block of gneiss over which time had thrown its carpet of velvet, its glistening lichens, and dusky mosses, lustrous in the sunshine,--

"She is lovely!" he exclaimed.