第99章

It is ours also to disarm and elude the wrath of men, to turn the swords of our foes against each other, to glide (if not incorporeal) invisible to eyes over which we can throw a mist and darkness.And this some seers have professed to be the virtue of a stone of agate.Abaris placed it in his arrow.I will find you an herb in yon valley that will give a surer charm than the agate and the arrow.In one word, know this, that the humblest and meanest products of Nature are those from which the sublimest properties are to be drawn.""But," said Glyndon, "if possessed of these great secrets, why so churlish in withholding their diffusion? Does not the false or charlatanic science differ in this from the true and indisputable,--that the last communicates to the world the process by which it attains its discoveries; the first boasts of marvellous results, and refuses to explain the causes?""Well said, O Logician of the Schools; but think again.Suppose we were to impart all our knowledge to all mankind indiscriminately,--alike to the vicious and the virtuous,--should we be benefactors or scourges? Imagine the tyrant, the sensualist, the evil and corrupted being possessed of these tremendous powers; would he not be a demon let loose on earth?

Grant that the same privilege be accorded also to the good; and in what state would be society? Engaged in a Titan war,--the good forever on the defensive, the bad forever in assault.In the present condition of the earth, evil is a more active principle than good, and the evil would prevail.It is for these reasons that we are not only solemnly bound to administer our lore only to those who will not misuse and pervert it, but that we place our ordeal in tests that purify the passions and elevate the desires.And Nature in this controls and assists us: for it places awful guardians and insurmountable barriers between the ambition of vice and the heaven of the loftier science."Such made a small part of the numerous conversations Mejnour held with his pupil,--conversations that, while they appeared to address themselves to the reason, inflamed yet more the fancy.

It was the very disclaiming of all powers which Nature, properly investigated, did not suffice to create, that gave an air of probability to those which Mejnour asserted Nature might bestow.

Thus days and weeks rolled on; and the mind of Glyndon, gradually fitted to this sequestered and musing life, forgot at last the vanities and chimeras of the world without.

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 SOMETHINGGREAT 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.