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Seraphita

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1432 · 312,752 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Seraphita

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: September 7, 2005 [eBook #1432]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1432

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SERAPHITA ***

SERAPHITA


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                            DEDICATION

  To Madame Eveline de Hanska, nee Comtesse Rzewuska.

  Madame,--Here is the work which you asked of me. I am happy, in
  thus dedicating it, to offer you a proof of the respectful
  affection you allow me to bear you. If I am reproached for
  impotence in this attempt to draw from the depths of mysticism a
  book which seeks to give, in the lucid transparency of our
  beautiful language, the luminous poesy of the Orient, to you the
  blame! Did you not command this struggle (resembling that of
  Jacob) by telling me that the most imperfect sketch of this
  Figure, dreamed of by you, as it has been by me since childhood,
  would still be something to you?

  Here, then, it is,--that something. Would that this book could
  belong exclusively to noble spirits, preserved like yours from
  worldly pettiness by solitude! THEY would know how to give to it
  the melodious rhythm that it lacks, which might have made it, in
  the hands of a poet, the glorious epic that France still awaits.
  But from me they must accept it as one of those sculptured
  balustrades, carved by a hand of faith, on which the pilgrims
  lean, in the choir of some glorious church, to think upon the end
  of man.

  I am, madame, with respect,
  Your devoted servant,
  De Balzac.




SERAPHITA




CHAPTER I. SERAPHITUS


As the eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the
imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated
edges, like a granite lace, against which the surges of the North Sea
roar incessantly? Who has not dreamed of the majestic sights to be seen
on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and
little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may
almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable
hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts
the conformation of a fish’s spine, fishery being the staple commerce of
the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who
cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen
degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain
existence. Thanks to perils devoid of glory, to year-long snows which
clothe the Norway peaks and guard them from profaning foot of traveller,
these sublime beauties are virgin still; they will be seen to harmonize
with human phenomena, also virgin--at least to poetry--which here took
place, the history of which it is our purpose to relate.

If one of these inlets, mere fissures to the eyes of the eider-ducks, is
wide enough for the sea not to freeze between the prison-walls of
rock against which it surges, the country-people call the little bay
a “fiord,”--a word which geographers of every nation have adopted into
their respective languages. Though a certain resemblance exists
among all these fiords, each has its own characteristics. The sea has
everywhere forced its way as through a breach, yet the rocks about each
fissure are diversely rent, and their tumultuous precipices defy the
rules of geometric law. Here the scarp is dentelled like a saw; there
the narrow ledges barely allow the snow to lodge or the noble crests of
the Northern pines to spread themselves; farther on, some convulsion of
Nature may have rounded a coquettish curve into a lovely valley flanked
in rising terraces with black-plumed pines. Truly we are tempted to call
this land the Switzerland of Ocean.

Midway between Trondhjem and Christiansand lies an inlet called the
Strom-fiord. If the Strom-fiord is not the loveliest of these rocky
landscapes, it has the merit of displaying the terrestrial grandeurs
of Norway, and of enshrining the scenes of a history that is indeed
celestial.

The general outline of the Strom-fiord seems at first sight to be that
of a funnel washed out by the sea. The passage which the waves have
forced present to the eye an image of the eternal struggle between old
Ocean and the granite rock,--two creations of equal power, one through
inertia, the other by ceaseless motion. Reefs of fantastic shape run out
on either side, and bar the way of ships and forbid their entrance. The
intrepid sons of Norway cross these reefs on foot, springing from rock
to rock, undismayed at the abyss--a hundred fathoms deep and only six
feet wide--which yawns beneath them. Here a tottering block of gneiss
falling athwart two rocks gives an uncertain footway; there the
hunters or the fishermen, carrying their loads, have flung the stems of
fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the projecting reefs, around and
beneath which the surges roar incessantly. This dangerous entrance to
the little bay bears obliquely to the right with a serpentine movement,
and there encounters a mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet
above sea-level, the base of which is a vertical palisade of solid
rock more than a mile and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere
yielding to clefts or undulations until it reaches a height of two
hundred feet above the water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven
back with equal violence by the inert force of the mountain to the
opposite shore, gently curved by the spent force of the retreating
waves.

The fiord is closed at the upper end by a vast gneiss formation crowned
with forests, down which a river plunges in cascades, becomes a torrent
when the snows are melting, spreads into a sheet of waters, and then
falls with a roar into the bay,--vomiting as it does so the hoary pines
and the aged larches washed down from the forests and scarce seen amid
the foam. These trees plunge headlong into the fiord and reappear after
a time on the surface, clinging together and forming islets which float
ashore on the beaches, where the inhabitants of a village on the left
bank of the Strom-fiord gather them up, split, broken (though sometimes
whole), and always stripped of bark and branches. The mountain which
receives at its base the assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the
buffeting of the wild North wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest,
wrapped at all seasons in a mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak
of Norway; its proximity to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen
hundred feet, a degree of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of
the globe. The summit of this rocky mass, rising sheer from the fiord
on one side, slopes gradually downward to the east, where it joins the
declivities of the Sieg and forms a series of terraced valleys, the
chilly temperature of which allows no growth but that of shrubs and
stunted trees.

The upper end of the fiord, where the waters enter it as they come down
from the forest, is called the Siegdahlen,--a word which may be held to
mean “the shedding of the Sieg,”--the river itself receiving that name.
The curving shore opposite to the face of the Falberg is the valley
of Jarvis,--a smiling scene overlooked by hills clothed with firs,
birch-trees, and larches, mingled with a few oaks and beeches, the
richest coloring of all the varied tapestries which Nature in these
northern regions spreads upon the surface of her rugged rocks. The eye
can readily mark the line where the soil, warmed by the rays of the sun,
bears cultivation and shows the native growth of the Norwegian flora.
Here the expanse of the fiord is broad enough to allow the sea, dashed
back by the Falberg, to spend its expiring force in gentle murmurs upon
the lower slope of these hills,--a shore bordered with finest sand,
strewn with mica and sparkling pebbles, porphyry, and marbles of a
thousand tints, brought from Sweden by the river floods, together with
ocean waifs, shells, and flowers of the sea driven in by tempests,
whether of the Pole or Tropics.

At the foot of the hills of Jarvis lies a village of some two hundred
wooden houses, where an isolated population lives like a swarm of bees
in a forest, without increasing or diminishing; vegetating happily,
while wringing their means of living from the breast of a stern Nature.
The almost unknown existence of the little hamlet is readily accounted
for. Few of its inhabitants were bold enough to risk their lives
among the reefs to reach the deep-sea fishing,--the staple industry of
Norwegians on the least dangerous portions of their coast. The fish of
the fiord were numerous enough to suffice, in part at least, for the
sustenance of the inhabitants; the valley pastures provided milk and
butter; a certain amount of fruitful, well-tilled soil yielded rye
and hemp and vegetables, which necessity taught the people to protect
against the severity of the cold and the fleeting but terrible heat of
the sun with the shrewd ability which Norwegians display in the two-fold
struggle. The difficulty of communication with the outer world, either
by land where the roads are impassable, or by sea where none but tiny
boats can thread their way through the maritime defiles that guard the
entrance to the bay, hinder these people from growing rich by the sale
of their timber. It would cost enormous sums to either blast a channel
out to sea or construct a way to the interior. The roads from Christiana
to Trondhjem all turn toward the Strom-fiord, and cross the Sieg by a
bridge some score of miles above its fall into the bay. The country to
the north, between Jarvis and Trondhjem, is covered with impenetrable
forests, while to the south the Falberg is nearly as much separated
from Christiana by inaccessible precipices. The village of Jarvis might
perhaps have communicated with the interior of Norway and Sweden by
the river Sieg; but to do this and to be thus brought into contact with
civilization, the Strom-fiord needed the presence of a man of genius.
Such a man did actually appear there,--a poet, a Swede of great
religious fervor, who died admiring, even reverencing this region as one
of the noblest works of the Creator.

Minds endowed by study with an inward sight, and whose quick perceptions
bring before the soul, as though painted on a canvas, the contrasting
scenery of this universe, will now apprehend the general features of
the Strom-fiord. They alone, perhaps, can thread their way through the
tortuous channels of the reef, or flee with the battling waves to the
everlasting rebuff of the Falberg whose white peaks mingle with the
vaporous clouds of the pearl-gray sky, or watch with delight the curving
sheet of waters, or hear the rushing of the Sieg as it hangs for an
instant in long fillets and then falls over a picturesque abatis of
noble trees toppled confusedly together, sometimes upright, sometimes
half-sunken beneath the rocks. It may be that such minds alone can dwell
upon the smiling scenes nestling among the lower hills of Jarvis; where
the luscious Northern vegetables spring up in families, in myriads,
where the white birches bend, graceful as maidens, where colonnades
of beeches rear their boles mossy with the growth of centuries, where
shades of green contrast, and white clouds float amid the blackness of
the distant pines, and tracts of many-tinted crimson and purple shrubs
are shaded endlessly; in short, where blend all colors, all perfumes of
a flora whose wonders are still ignored. Widen the boundaries of this
limited ampitheatre, spring upward to the clouds, lose yourself among
the rocks where the seals are lying and even then your thought cannot
compass the wealth of beauty nor the poetry of this Norwegian coast.
Can your thought be as vast as the ocean that bounds it? as weird as
the fantastic forms drawn by these forests, these clouds, these shadows,
these changeful lights?

Do you see above the meadows on that lowest slope which undulates around
the higher hills of Jarvis two or three hundred houses roofed with
“noever,” a sort of thatch made of birch-bark,--frail houses, long and
low, looking like silk-worms on a mulberry-leaf tossed hither by the
winds? Above these humble, peaceful dwellings stands the church, built
with a simplicity in keeping with the poverty of the villagers. A
graveyard surrounds the chancel, and a little farther on you see
the parsonage. Higher up, on a projection of the mountain is a
dwelling-house, the only one of stone; for which reason the inhabitants
of the village call it “the Swedish Castle.” In fact, a wealthy Swede
settled in Jarvis about thirty years before this history begins, and did
his best to ameliorate its condition. This little house, certainly not
a castle, built with the intention of leading the inhabitants to build
others like it, was noticeable for its solidity and for the wall that
inclosed it, a rare thing in Norway where, notwithstanding the abundance
of stone, wood alone is used for all fences, even those of fields.
This Swedish house, thus protected against the climate, stood on rising
ground in the centre of an immense courtyard. The windows were sheltered
by those projecting pent-house roofs supported by squared trunks of
trees which give so patriarchal an air to Northern dwellings. From
beneath them the eye could see the savage nudity of the Falberg, or
compare the infinitude of the open sea with the tiny drop of water in
the foaming fiord; the ear could hear the flowing of the Sieg, whose
white sheet far away looked motionless as it fell into its granite
cup edged for miles around with glaciers,--in short, from this vantage
ground the whole landscape whereon our simple yet superhuman drama was
about to be enacted could be seen and noted.

The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to
Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a
usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A wind,
whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the ice of
the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf. Seldom
indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of frozen waters
reflecting the colors of the sky; a wondrous site in the bosom of
these mountains when all other aspects of nature are levelled beneath
successive sheets of snow, and crests and valleys are alike mere
folds of the vast mantle flung by winter across a landscape at once so
mournfully dazzling and so monotonous. The falling volume of the Sieg,
suddenly frozen, formed an immense arcade beneath which the inhabitants
might have crossed under shelter from the blast had any dared to risk
themselves inland. But the dangers of every step away from their own
surroundings kept even the boldest hunters in their homes, afraid lest
the narrow paths along the precipices, the clefts and fissures among the
rocks, might be unrecognizable beneath the snow.

Thus it was that no human creature gave life to the white desert where
Boreas reigned, his voice alone resounding at distant intervals. The
sky, nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of the
fiord. Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse, trusting
to the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious
rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come
to them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts alone across the sands
of Africa, the bird is neither seen nor heard; the torpid atmosphere,
deprived of its electrical conditions, echoes neither the whirr of its
wings nor its joyous notes. Besides, what human eye was strong enough to
bear the glitter of those pinnacles adorned with sparkling crystals, or
the sharp reflections of the snow, iridescent on the summits in the rays
of a pallid sun which infrequently appeared, like a dying man seeking to
make known that he still lives. Often, when the flocks of gray clouds,
driven in squadrons athwart the mountains and among the tree-tops, hid
the sky with their triple veils Earth, lacking the celestial lights, lit
herself by herself.

Here, then, we meet the majesty of Cold, seated eternally at the pole
in that regal silence which is the attribute of all absolute monarchy.
Every extreme principle carries with it an appearance of negation and
the symptoms of death; for is not life the struggle of two forces? Here
in this Northern nature nothing lived. One sole power--the unproductive
power of ice--reigned unchallenged. The roar of the open sea no longer
reached the deaf, dumb inlet, where during one short season of the year
Nature made haste to produce the slender harvests necessary for the food
of the patient people. A few tall pine-trees lifted their black pyramids
garlanded with snow, and the form of their long branches and depending
shoots completed the mourning garments of those solemn heights.

Each household gathered in its chimney-corner, in houses carefully
closed from the outer air, and well supplied with biscuit, melted
butter, dried fish, and other provisions laid in for the seven-months
winter. The very smoke of these dwellings was hardly seen, half-hidden
as they were beneath the snow, against the weight of which they were
protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some
distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around
each building.

During these terrible winter months the women spun and dyed the woollen
stuffs and the linen fabrics with which they clothed their families,
while the men read, or fell into those endless meditations which have
given birth to so many profound theories, to the mystic dreams of the
North, to its beliefs, to its studies (so full and so complete in one
science, at least, sounded as with a plummet), to its manners and its
morals, half-monastic, which force the soul to react and feed upon
itself and make the Norwegian peasant a being apart among the peoples of
Europe.

Such was the condition of the Strom-fiord in the first year of the
nineteenth century and about the middle of the month of May.

On a morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the
fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the snow
and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base of the
Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit. What were
they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have been taken for
eider-ducks sailing in consort before the wind. Not the boldest hunter
nor the most superstitious fisherman would have attributed to human
beings the power to move safely along the slender lines traced beneath
the snow by the granite ledges, where yet this couple glided with the
terrifying dexterity of somnambulists who, forgetting their own weight
and the dangers of the slightest deviation, hurry along a ridge-pole and
keep their equilibrium by the power of some mysterious force.

“Stop me, Seraphitus,” said a pale young girl, “and let me breathe. I
look at you, you only, while scaling these walls of the gulf; otherwise,
what would become of me? I am such a feeble creature. Do I tire you?”

“No,” said the being on whose arm she leaned. “But let us go on, Minna;
the place where we are is not firm enough to stand on.”

Once more the snow creaked sharply beneath the long boards fastened to
their feet, and soon they reached the upper terrace of the first ledge,
clearly defined upon the flank of the precipice. The person whom Minna
had addressed as Seraphitus threw his weight upon his right heel,
arresting the plank--six and a half feet long and narrow as the foot of
a child--which was fastened to his boot by a double thong of leather.
This plank, two inches thick, was covered with reindeer skin, which
bristled against the snow when the foot was raised, and served to stop
the wearer. Seraphitus drew in his left foot, furnished with another
“skee,” which was only two feet long, turned swiftly where he stood,
caught his timid companion in his arms, lifted her in spite of the long
boards on her feet, and placed her on a projecting rock from which he
brushed the snow with his pelisse.

“You are safe there, Minna; you can tremble at your ease.”

“We are a third of the way up the Ice-Cap,” she said, looking at the
peak to which she gave the popular name by which it is known in Norway;
“I can hardly believe it.”

Too much out of breath to say more, she smiled at Seraphitus, who,
without answering, laid his hand upon her heart and listened to its
sounding throbs, rapid as those of a frightened bird.

“It often beats as fast when I run,” she said.

Seraphitus inclined his head with a gesture that was neither coldness
nor indifference, and yet, despite the grace which made the movement
almost tender, it none the less bespoke a certain negation, which in a
woman would have seemed an exquisite coquetry. Seraphitus clasped the
young girl in his arms. Minna accepted the caress as an answer to her
words, continuing to gaze at him. As he raised his head, and threw back
with impatient gesture the golden masses of his hair to free his brow,
he saw an expression of joy in the eyes of his companion.

“Yes, Minna,” he said in a voice whose paternal accents were charming
from the lips of a being who was still adolescent, “Keep your eyes on
me; do not look below you.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“You wish to know why? then look!”

Minna glanced quickly at her feet and cried out suddenly like a child
who sees a tiger. The awful sensation of abysses seized her; one glance
sufficed to communicate its contagion. The fiord, eager for food,
bewildered her with its loud voice ringing in her ears, interposing
between herself and life as though to devour her more surely. From the
crown of her head to her feet and along her spine an icy shudder ran;
then suddenly intolerable heat suffused her nerves, beat in her veins
and overpowered her extremities with electric shocks like those of the
torpedo. Too feeble to resist, she felt herself drawn by a mysterious
power to the depths below, wherein she fancied that she saw some monster
belching its venom, a monster whose magnetic eyes were charming her,
whose open jaws appeared to craunch their prey before they seized it.

“I die, my Seraphitus, loving none but thee,” she said, making a
mechanical movement to fling herself into the abyss.

Seraphitus breathed softly on her forehead and eyes. Suddenly, like
a traveller relaxed after a bath, Minna forgot these keen emotions,
already dissipated by that caressing breath which penetrated her body
and filled it with balsamic essences as quickly as the breath itself had
crossed the air.

“Who art thou?” she said, with a feeling of gentle terror. “Ah, but I
know! thou art my life. How canst thou look into that gulf and not die?”
 she added presently.

Seraphitus left her clinging to the granite rock and placed himself at
the edge of the narrow platform on which they stood, whence his eyes
plunged to the depths of the fiord, defying its dazzling invitation. His
body did not tremble, his brow was white and calm as that of a marble
statue,--an abyss facing an abyss.

“Seraphitus! dost thou not love me? come back!” she cried. “Thy danger
renews my terror. Who art thou to have such superhuman power at thy
age?” she asked as she felt his arms inclosing her once more.

“But, Minna,” answered Seraphitus, “you look fearlessly at greater
spaces far than that.”

Then with raised finger, this strange being pointed upward to the blue
dome, which parting clouds left clear above their heads, where
stars could be seen in open day by virtue of atmospheric laws as yet
unstudied.

“But what a difference!” she answered smiling.

“You are right,” he said; “we are born to stretch upward to the
skies. Our native land, like the face of a mother, cannot terrify her
children.”

His voice vibrated through the being of his companion, who made no
reply.

“Come! let us go on,” he said.

The pair darted forward along the narrow paths traced back and forth
upon the mountain, skimming from terrace to terrace, from line to line,
with the rapidity of a barb, that bird of the desert. Presently they
reached an open space, carpeted with turf and moss and flowers, where no
foot had ever trod.

“Oh, the pretty saeter!” cried Minna, giving to the upland meadow its
Norwegian name. “But how comes it here, at such a height?”

“Vegetation ceases here, it is true,” said Seraphitus. “These few plants
and flowers are due to that sheltering rock which protects the meadow
from the polar winds. Put that tuft in your bosom, Minna,” he added,
gathering a flower,--“that balmy creation which no eye has ever seen;
keep the solitary matchless flower in memory of this one matchless
morning of your life. You will find no other guide to lead you again to
this saeter.”

So saying, he gave her the hybrid plant his falcon eye had seen amid the
tufts of gentian acaulis and saxifrages,--a marvel, brought to bloom
by the breath of angels. With girlish eagerness Minna seized the tufted
plant of transparent green, vivid as emerald, which was formed of little
leaves rolled trumpet-wise, brown at the smaller end but changing tint
by tint to their delicately notched edges, which were green. These
leaves were so tightly pressed together that they seemed to blend and
form a mat or cluster of rosettes. Here and there from this green ground
rose pure white stars edged with a line of gold, and from their throats
came crimson anthers but no pistils. A fragrance, blended of roses and
of orange blossoms, yet ethereal and fugitive, gave something as it
were celestial to that mysterious flower, which Seraphitus sadly
contemplated, as though it uttered plaintive thoughts which he alone
could understand. But to Minna this mysterious phenomenon seemed a mere
caprice of nature giving to stone the freshness, softness, and perfume
of plants.

“Why do you call it matchless? can it not reproduce itself?” she asked,
looking at Seraphitus, who colored and turned away.

“Let us sit down,” he said presently; “look below you, Minna. See! At
this height you will have no fear. The abyss is so far beneath us that
we no longer have a sense of its depths; it acquires the perspective
uniformity of ocean, the vagueness of clouds, the soft coloring of the
sky. See, the ice of the fiord is a turquoise, the dark pine forests are
mere threads of brown; for us all abysses should be thus adorned.”

Seraphitus said the words with that fervor of tone and gesture seen
and known only by those who have ascended the highest mountains of the
globe,--a fervor so involuntarily acquired that the haughtiest of men
is forced to regard his guide as a brother, forgetting his own superior
station till he descends to the valleys and the abodes of his kind.
Seraphitus unfastened the skees from Minna’s feet, kneeling before her.
The girl did not notice him, so absorbed was she in the marvellous view
now offered of her native land, whose rocky outlines could here be seen
at a glance. She felt, with deep emotion, the solemn permanence of those
frozen summits, to which words could give no adequate utterance.

“We have not come here by human power alone,” she said, clasping her
hands. “But perhaps I dream.”

“You think that facts the causes of which you cannot perceive are
supernatural,” replied her companion.

“Your replies,” she said, “always bear the stamp of some deep thought.
When I am near you I understand all things without an effort. Ah, I am
free!”

“If so, you will not need your skees,” he answered.

“Oh!” she said; “I who would fain unfasten yours and kiss your feet!”

“Keep such words for Wilfrid,” said Seraphitus, gently.

“Wilfrid!” cried Minna angrily; then, softening as she glanced at her
companion’s face and trying, but in vain, to take his hand, she added,
“You are never angry, never; you are so hopelessly perfect in all
things.”

“From which you conclude that I am unfeeling.”

Minna was startled at this lucid interpretation of her thought.

“You prove to me, at any rate, that we understand each other,” she said,
with the grace of a loving woman.

Seraphitus softly shook his head and looked sadly and gently at her.

“You, who know all things,” said Minna, “tell me why it is that the
timidity I felt below is over now that I have mounted higher. Why do I
dare to look at you for the first time face to face, while lower down I
scarcely dared to give a furtive glance?”

“Perhaps because we are withdrawn from the pettiness of earth,” he
answered, unfastening his pelisse.

“Never, never have I seen you so beautiful!” cried Minna, sitting down
on a mossy rock and losing herself in contemplation of the being who
had now guided her to a part of the peak hitherto supposed to be
inaccessible.

Never, in truth, had Seraphitus shone with so bright a radiance,--the
only word which can render the illumination of his face and the aspect
of his whole person. Was this splendor due to the lustre which the pure
air of mountains and the reflections of the snow give to the complexion?
Was it produced by the inward impulse which excites the body at the
instant when exertion is arrested? Did it come from the sudden contrast
between the glory of the sun and the darkness of the clouds, from whose
shadow the charming couple had just emerged? Perhaps to all these causes
we may add the effect of a phenomenon, one of the noblest which human
nature has to offer. If some able physiologist had studied this being
(who, judging by the pride on his brow and the lightning in his eyes
seemed a youth of about seventeen years of age), and if the student had
sought for the springs of that beaming life beneath the whitest skin
that ever the North bestowed upon her offspring, he would undoubtedly
have believed either in some phosphoric fluid of the nerves shining
beneath the cuticle, or in the constant presence of an inward luminary,
whose rays issued through the being of Seraphitus like a light through
an alabaster vase. Soft and slender as were his hands, ungloved to
remove his companion’s snow-boots, they seemed possessed of a strength
equal to that which the Creator gave to the diaphanous tentacles of the
crab. The fire darting from his vivid glance seemed to struggle with the
beams of the sun, not to take but to give them light. His body, slim and
delicate as that of a woman, gave evidence of one of those natures which
are feeble apparently, but whose strength equals their will, rendering
them at times powerful. Of medium height, Seraphitus appeared to grow in
stature as he turned fully round and seemed about to spring upward. His
hair, curled by a fairy’s hand and waving to the breeze, increased
the illusion produced by this aerial attitude; yet his bearing, wholly
without conscious effort, was the result far more of a moral phenomenon
than of a corporal habit.

Minna’s imagination seconded this illusion, under the dominion of which
all persons would assuredly have fallen,--an illusion which gave to
Seraphitus the appearance of a vision dreamed of in happy sleep. No
known type conveys an image of that form so majestically made to Minna,
but which to the eyes of a man would have eclipsed in womanly grace the
fairest of Raphael’s creations. That painter of heaven has ever put
a tranquil joy, a loving sweetness, into the lines of his angelic
conceptions; but what soul, unless it contemplated Seraphitus himself,
could have conceived the ineffable emotions imprinted on his face? Who
would have divined, even in the dreams of artists, where all things
become possible, the shadow cast by some mysterious awe upon that brow,
shining with intellect, which seemed to question Heaven and to pity
Earth? The head hovered awhile disdainfully, as some majestic bird whose
cries reverberate on the atmosphere, then bowed itself resignedly, like
the turtledove uttering soft notes of tenderness in the depths of the
silent woods. His complexion was of marvellous whiteness, which brought
out vividly the coral lips, the brown eyebrows, and the silken lashes,
the only colors that trenched upon the paleness of that face, whose
perfect regularity did not detract from the grandeur of the sentiments
expressed in it; nay, thought and emotion were reflected there, without
hindrance or violence, with the majestic and natural gravity which we
delight in attributing to superior beings. That face of purest marble
expressed in all things strength and peace.

Minna rose to take the hand of Seraphitus, hoping thus to draw him to
her, and to lay on that seductive brow a kiss given more from admiration
than from love; but a glance at the young man’s eyes, which pierced her
as a ray of sunlight penetrates a prism, paralyzed the young girl. She
felt, but without comprehending, a gulf between them; then she turned
away her head and wept. Suddenly a strong hand seized her by the waist,
and a soft voice said to her: “Come!” She obeyed, resting her head,
suddenly revived, upon the heart of her companion, who, regulating his
step to hers with gentle and attentive conformity, led her to a spot
whence they could see the radiant glories of the polar Nature.

“Before I look, before I listen to you, tell me, Seraphitus, why you
repulse me. Have I displeased you? and how? tell me! I want nothing for
myself; I would that all my earthly goods were yours, for the riches
of my heart are yours already. I would that light came to my eyes only
though your eyes just as my thought is born of your thought. I should
not then fear to offend you, for I should give you back the echoes of
your soul, the words of your heart, day by day,--as we render to God the
meditations with which his spirit nourishes our minds. I would be thine
alone.”

“Minna, a constant desire is that which shapes our future. Hope on! But
if you would be pure in heart mingle the idea of the All-Powerful with
your affections here below; then you will love all creatures, and your
heart will rise to heights indeed.”

“I will do all you tell me,” she answered, lifting her eyes to his with
a timid movement.

“I cannot be your companion,” said Seraphitus sadly.

He seemed to repress some thoughts, then stretched his arms towards
Christiana, just visible like a speck on the horizon and said:--

“Look!”

“We are very small,” she said.

“Yes, but we become great through feeling and through intellect,”
 answered Seraphitus. “With us, and us alone, Minna, begins the knowledge
of things; the little that we learn of the laws of the visible world
enables us to apprehend the immensity of the worlds invisible. I know
not if the time has come to speak thus to you, but I would, ah, I would
communicate to you the flame of my hopes! Perhaps we may one day be
together in the world where Love never dies.”

“Why not here and now?” she said, murmuring.

“Nothing is stable here,” he said, disdainfully. “The passing joys of
earthly love are gleams which reveal to certain souls the coming of
joys more durable; just as the discovery of a single law of nature leads
certain privileged beings to a conception of the system of the universe.
Our fleeting happiness here below is the forerunning proof of another
and a perfect happiness, just as the earth, a fragment of the world,
attests the universe. We cannot measure the vast orbit of the Divine
thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is great; but we
can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait. Men ever mislead
themselves in science by not perceiving that all things on their globe
are related and co-ordinated to the general evolution, to a constant
movement and production which bring with them, necessarily, both
advancement and an End. Man himself is not a finished creation; if he
were, God would not Be.”

“How is it that in thy short life thou hast found the time to learn so
many things?” said the young girl.

“I remember,” he replied.

“Thou art nobler than all else I see.”

“We are the noblest of God’s greatest works. Has He not given us the
faculty of reflecting on Nature; of gathering it within us by thought;
of making it a footstool and stepping-stone from and by which to rise
to Him? We love according to the greater or the lesser portion of heaven
our souls contain. But do not be unjust, Minna; behold the magnificence
spread before you. Ocean expands at your feet like a carpet; the
mountains resemble ampitheatres; heaven’s ether is above them like the
arching folds of a stage curtain. Here we may breathe the thoughts of
God, as it were like a perfume. See! the angry billows which engulf the
ships laden with men seem to us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we
raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of
stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this
nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far
than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you
not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do
you not feel your pinions? Let us pray.”

Seraphitus knelt down and crossed his hands upon his breast, while Minna
fell, weeping, on her knees. Thus they remained for a time, while
the azure dome above their heads grew larger and strong rays of light
enveloped them without their knowledge.

“Why dost thou not weep when I weep?” said Minna, in a broken voice.

“They who are all spirit do not weep,” replied Seraphitus rising; “Why
should I weep? I see no longer human wretchedness. Here, Good appears
in all its majesty. There, beneath us, I hear the supplications and the
wailings of that harp of sorrows which vibrates in the hands of captive
souls. Here, I listen to the choir of harps harmonious. There, below,
is hope, the glorious inception of faith; but here is faith--it reigns,
hope realized!”

“You will never love me; I am too imperfect; you disdain me,” said the
young girl.

“Minna, the violet hidden at the feet of the oak whispers to itself:
‘The sun does not love me; he comes not.’ The sun says: ‘If my rays
shine upon her she will perish, poor flower.’ Friend of the flower, he
sends his beams through the oak leaves, he veils, he tempers them, and
thus they color the petals of his beloved. I have not veils enough,
I fear lest you see me too closely; you would tremble if you knew me
better. Listen: I have no taste for earthly fruits. Your joys, I know
them all too well, and, like the sated emperors of pagan Rome, I have
reached disgust of all things; I have received the gift of vision. Leave
me! abandon me!” he murmured, sorrowfully.

Seraphitus turned and seated himself on a projecting rock, dropping his
head upon his breast.

“Why do you drive me to despair?” said Minna.

“Go, go!” cried Seraphitus, “I have nothing that you want of me. Your
love is too earthly for my love. Why do you not love Wilfrid? Wilfrid is
a man, tested by passions; he would clasp you in his vigorous arms and
make you feel a hand both broad and strong. His hair is black, his
eyes are full of human thoughts, his heart pours lava in every word he
utters; he could kill you with caresses. Let him be your beloved, your
husband! Yes, thine be Wilfrid!”

Minna wept aloud.

“Dare you say that you do not love him?” he went on, in a voice which
pierced her like a dagger.

“Have mercy, have mercy, my Seraphitus!”

“Love him, poor child of Earth to which thy destiny has indissolubly
bound thee,” said the strange being, beckoning Minna by a gesture, and
forcing her to the edge of the saeter, whence he pointed downward to a
scene that might well inspire a young girl full of enthusiasm with the
fancy that she stood above this earth.

“I longed for a companion to the kingdom of Light; I wished to show you
that morsel of mud, I find you bound to it. Farewell. Remain on earth;
enjoy through the senses; obey your nature; turn pale with pallid men;
blush with women; sport with children; pray with the guilty; raise your
eyes to heaven when sorrows overtake you; tremble, hope, throb in all
your pulses; you will have a companion; you can laugh and weep, and give
and receive. I,--I am an exile, far from heaven; a monster, far from
earth. I live of myself and by myself. I feel by the spirit; I breathe
through my brow; I see by thought; I die of impatience and of longing.
No one here below can fulfil my desires or calm my griefs. I have
forgotten how to weep. I am alone. I resign myself, and I wait.”

Seraphitus looked at the flowery mound on which he had seated Minna;
then he turned and faced the frowning heights, whose pinnacles were
wrapped in clouds; to them he cast, unspoken, the remainder of his
thoughts.

“Minna, do you hear those delightful strains?” he said after a pause,
with the voice of a dove, for the eagle’s cry was hushed; “it is like
the music of those Eolian harps your poets hang in forests and on the
mountains. Do you see the shadowy figures passing among the clouds,
the winged feet of those who are making ready the gifts of heaven? They
bring refreshment to the soul; the skies are about to open and shed the
flowers of spring upon the earth. See, a gleam is darting from the pole.
Let us fly, let us fly! It is time we go!”

In a moment their skees were refastened, and the pair descended the
Falberg by the steep slopes which join the mountain to the valleys of
the Sieg. Miraculous perception guided their course, or, to speak more
properly, their flight. When fissures covered with snow intercepted
them, Seraphitus caught Minna in his arms and darted with rapid motion,
lightly as a bird, over the crumbling causeways of the abyss. Sometimes,
while propelling his companion, he deviated to the right or left to
avoid a precipice, a tree, a projecting rock, which he seemed to see
beneath the snow, as an old sailor, familiar with the ocean, discerns
the hidden reefs by the color, the trend, or the eddying of the
water. When they reached the paths of the Siegdahlen, where they could
fearlessly follow a straight line to regain the ice of the fiord,
Seraphitus stopped Minna.

“You have nothing to say to me?” he asked.

“I thought you would rather think alone,” she answered respectfully.

“Let us hasten, Minette; it is almost night,” he said.

Minna quivered as she heard the voice, now so changed, of her guide,--a
pure voice, like that of a young girl, which dissolved the fantastic
dream through which she had been passing. Seraphitus seemed to be laying
aside his male force and the too keen intellect that flames from his
eyes. Presently the charming pair glided across the fiord and reached
the snow-field which divides the shore from the first range of houses;
then, hurrying forward as daylight faded, they sprang up the hill
toward the parsonage, as though they were mounting the steps of a great
staircase.

“My father must be anxious,” said Minna.

“No,” answered Seraphitus.

As he spoke the couple reached the porch of the humble dwelling where
Monsieur Becker, the pastor of Jarvis, sat reading while awaiting his
daughter for the evening meal.

“Dear Monsieur Becker,” said Seraphitus, “I have brought Minna back to
you safe and sound.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said the old man, laying his spectacles on
his book; “you must be very tired.”

“Oh, no,” said Minna, and as she spoke she felt the soft breath of her
companion on her brow.

“Dear heart, will you come day after to-morrow evening and take tea with
me?”

“Gladly, dear.”

“Monsieur Becker, you will bring her, will you not?”

“Yes, mademoiselle.”

Seraphitus inclined his head with a pretty gesture, and bowed to the old
pastor as he left the house. A few moments later he reached the great
courtyard of the Swedish villa. An old servant, over eighty years of
age, appeared in the portico bearing a lantern. Seraphitus slipped off
his snow-shoes with the graceful dexterity of a woman, then darting into
the salon he fell exhausted and motionless on a wide divan covered with
furs.

“What will you take?” asked the old man, lighting the immensely tall
wax-candles that are used in Norway.

“Nothing, David, I am too weary.”

Seraphitus unfastened his pelisse lined with sable, threw it over him,
and fell asleep. The old servant stood for several minutes gazing with
loving eyes at the singular being before him, whose sex it would have
been difficult for any one at that moment to determine. Wrapped as he
was in a formless garment, which resembled equally a woman’s robe and a
man’s mantle, it was impossible not to fancy that the slender feet
which hung at the side of the couch were those of a woman, and equally
impossible not to note how the forehead and the outlines of the head
gave evidence of power brought to its highest pitch.

“She suffers, and she will not tell me,” thought the old man. “She is
dying, like a flower wilted by the burning sun.”

And the old man wept.




CHAPTER II. SERAPHITA


Later in the evening David re-entered the salon.

“I know who it is you have come to announce,” said Seraphita in a sleepy
voice. “Wilfrid may enter.”

Hearing these words a man suddenly presented himself, crossed the room
and sat down beside her.

“My dear Seraphita, are you ill?” he said. “You look paler than usual.”

She turned slowly towards him, tossing back her hair like a pretty woman
whose aching head leaves her no strength even for complaint.

“I was foolish enough to cross the fiord with Minna,” she said. “We
ascended the Falberg.”

“Do you mean to kill yourself?” he said with a lover’s terror.

“No, my good Wilfrid; I took the greatest care of your Minna.”

Wilfrid struck his hand violently on a table, rose hastily, and made
several steps towards the door with an exclamation full of pain; then he
returned and seemed about to remonstrate.

“Why this disturbance if you think me ill?” she said.

“Forgive me, have mercy!” he cried, kneeling beside her. “Speak to me
harshly if you will; exact all that the cruel fancies of a woman lead
you to imagine I least can bear; but oh, my beloved, do not doubt my
love. You take Minna like an axe to hew me down. Have mercy!”

“Why do you say these things, my friend, when you know that they are
useless?” she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that
Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light,
the shimmer of which was like the last vibrations of an Italian song.

“Ah! no man dies of anguish!” he murmured.

“You are suffering?” she said in a voice whose intonations produced upon
his heart the same effect as that of her look. “Would I could help you!”

“Love me as I love you.”

“Poor Minna!” she replied.

“Why am I unarmed!” exclaimed Wilfrid, violently.

“You are out of temper,” said Seraphita, smiling. “Come, have I not
spoken to you like those Parisian women whose loves you tell of?”

Wilfrid sat down, crossed his arms, and looked gloomily at Seraphita. “I
forgive you,” he said; “for you know not what you do.”

“You mistake,” she replied; “every woman from the days of Eve does good
and evil knowingly.”

“I believe it,” he said.

“I am sure of it, Wilfrid. Our instinct is precisely that which makes us
perfect. What you men learn, we feel.”

“Why, then, do you not feel how much I love you?”

“Because you do not love me.”

“Good God!”

“If you did, would you complain of your own sufferings?”

“You are terrible to-night, Seraphita. You are a demon.”

“No, but I am gifted with the faculty of comprehending, and it is awful.
Wilfrid, sorrow is a lamp which illumines life.”

“Why did you ascend the Falberg?”

“Minna will tell you. I am too weary to talk. You must talk to me,--you
who know so much, who have learned all things and forgotten nothing; you
who have passed through every social test. Talk to me, amuse me, I am
listening.”

“What can I tell you that you do not know? Besides, the request is
ironical. You allow yourself no intercourse with social life; you
trample on its conventions, its laws, its customs, sentiments, and
sciences; you reduce them all to the proportions such things take when
viewed by you beyond this universe.”

“Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong
to love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended
strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of
all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and
broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No,
we can never come to terms.”

“You are more maliciously unkind to-night than I have ever known you.”

“Unkind!” she said, with a look which seemed to blend all feelings into
one celestial emotion, “no, I am ill, I suffer, that is all. Leave me,
my friend; it is your manly right. We women should ever please you,
entertain you, be gay in your presence and have no whims save those that
amuse you. Come, what shall I do for you, friend? Shall I sing, shall I
dance, though weariness deprives me of the use of voice and limbs?--Ah!
gentlemen, be we on our deathbeds, we yet must smile to please you; you
call that, methinks, your right. Poor women! I pity them. Tell me, you
who abandon them when they grow old, is it because they have neither
hearts nor souls? Wilfrid, I am a hundred years old; leave me! leave me!
go to Minna!”

“Oh, my eternal love!”

“Do you know the meaning of eternity? Be silent, Wilfrid. You desire
me, but you do not love me. Tell me, do I not seem to you like those
coquettish Parisian women?”

“Certainly I no longer find you the pure celestial maiden I first saw in
the church of Jarvis.”

At these words Seraphita passed her hands across her brow, and when
she removed them Wilfrid was amazed at the saintly expression that
overspread her face.

“You are right, my friend,” she said; “I do wrong whenever I set my feet
upon your earth.”

“Oh, Seraphita, be my star! stay where you can ever bless me with that
clear light!”

As he spoke, he stretched forth his hand to take that of the young girl,
but she withdrew it, neither disdainfully nor in anger. Wilfrid rose
abruptly and walked to the window that she might not see the tears that
rose to his eyes.

“Why do you weep?” she said. “You are not a child, Wilfrid. Come back to
me. I wish it. You are annoyed if I show just displeasure. You see that
I am fatigued and ill, yet you force me to think and speak, and listen
to persuasions and ideas that weary me. If you had any real perception
of my nature, you would have made some music, you would have lulled my
feelings--but no, you love me for yourself and not for myself.”

The storm which convulsed the young man’s heart calmed down at these
words. He slowly approached her, letting his eyes take in the seductive
creature who lay exhausted before him, her head resting in her hand and
her elbow on the couch.

“You think that I do not love you,” she resumed. “You are mistaken.
Listen to me, Wilfrid. You are beginning to know much; you have suffered
much. Let me explain your thoughts to you. You wished to take my hand
just now”; she rose to a sitting posture, and her graceful motions
seemed to emit light. “When a young girl allows her hand to be taken it
is as though she made a promise, is it not? and ought she not to fulfil
it? You well know that I cannot be yours. Two sentiments divide and
inspire the love of all the women of the earth. Either they devote
themselves to suffering, degraded, and criminal beings whom they desire
to console, uplift, redeem; or they give themselves to superior men,
sublime and strong, whom they adore and seek to comprehend, and by whom
they are often annihilated. You have been degraded, though now you are
purified by the fires of repentance, and to-day you are once more noble;
but I know myself too feeble to be your equal, and too religious to bow
before any power but that On High. I may refer thus to your life, my
friend, for we are in the North, among the clouds, where all things are
abstractions.”

“You stab me, Seraphita, when you speak like this. It wounds me to hear
you apply the dreadful knowledge with which you strip from all things
human the properties that time and space and form have given them,
and consider them mathematically in the abstract, as geometry treats
substances from which it extracts solidity.”

“Well, I will respect your wishes, Wilfrid. Let the subject drop. Tell
me what you think of this bearskin rug which my poor David has spread
out.”

“It is very handsome.”

“Did you ever see me wear this ‘doucha greka’?”

She pointed to a pelisse made of cashmere and lined with the skin of the
black fox,--the name she gave it signifying “warm to the soul.”

“Do you believe that any sovereign has a fur that can equal it?” she
asked.

“It is worthy of her who wears it.”

“And whom you think beautiful?”

“Human words do not apply to her. Heart to heart is the only language I
can use.”

“Wilfrid, you are kind to soothe my griefs with such sweet words--which
you have said to others.”

“Farewell!”

“Stay. I love both you and Minna, believe me. To me you two are as one
being. United thus you can be my brother or, if you will, my sister.
Marry her; let me see you both happy before I leave this world of trial
and of pain. My God! the simplest of women obtain what they ask of a
lover; they whisper ‘Hush!’ and he is silent; ‘Die’ and he dies; ‘Love
me afar’ and he stays at a distance, like courtiers before a king! All
I desire is to see you happy, and you refuse me! Am I then
powerless?--Wilfrid, listen, come nearer to me. Yes, I should grieve to
see you marry Minna but--when I am here no longer, then--promise me to
marry her; heaven destined you for each other.”

“I listen to you with fascination, Seraphita. Your words are
incomprehensible, but they charm me. What is it you mean to say?”

“You are right; I forget to be foolish,--to be the poor creature whose
weaknesses gratify you. I torment you, Wilfrid. You came to these
Northern lands for rest, you, worn-out by the impetuous struggle of
genius unrecognized, you, weary with the patient toils of science, you,
who well-nigh dyed your hands in crime and wore the fetters of human
justice--”

Wilfrid dropped speechless on the carpet. Seraphita breathed softly on
his forehead, and in a moment he fell asleep at her feet.

“Sleep! rest!” she said, rising.

She passed her hands over Wilfrid’s brow; then the following sentences
escaped her lips, one by one,--all different in tone and accent, but all
melodious, full of a Goodness that seemed to emanate from her head in
vaporous waves, like the gleams the goddess chastely lays upon Endymion
sleeping.

“I cannot show myself such as I am to thee, dear Wilfrid,--to thee who
art strong.

“The hour is come; the hour when the effulgent lights of the future cast
their reflections backward on the soul; the hour when the soul awakes
into freedom.

“Now am I permitted to tell thee how I love thee. Dost thou not see the
nature of my love, a love without self-interest; a sentiment full of
thee, thee only; a love which follows thee into the future to light that
future for thee--for it is the one True Light. Canst thou now conceive
with what ardor I would have thee leave this life which weighs thee
down, and behold thee nearer than thou art to that world where Love is
never-failing? Can it be aught but suffering to love for one life only?
Hast thou not felt a thirst for the eternal love? Dost thou not feel the
bliss to which a creature rises when, with twin-soul, it loves the Being
who betrays not love, Him before whom we kneel in adoration?

“Would I had wings to cover thee, Wilfrid; power to give thee strength
to enter now into that world where all the purest joys of purest earthly
attachments are but shadows in the Light that shines, unceasing, to
illumine and rejoice all hearts.

“Forgive a friendly soul for showing thee the picture of thy sins, in
the charitable hope of soothing the sharp pangs of thy remorse. Listen
to the pardoning choir; refresh thy soul in the dawn now rising for thee
beyond the night of death. Yes, thy life, thy true life is there!

“May my words now reach thee clothed in the glorious forms of dreams;
may they deck themselves with images glowing and radiant as they hover
round you. Rise, rise, to the height where men can see themselves
distinctly, pressed together though they be like grains of sand upon
a sea-shore. Humanity rolls out like a many-colored ribbon. See the
diverse shades of that flower of the celestial gardens. Behold the
beings who lack intelligence, those who begin to receive it, those who
have passed through trials, those who love, those who follow wisdom and
aspire to the regions of Light!

“Canst thou comprehend, through this thought made visible, the destiny
of humanity?--whence it came, whither to goeth? Continue steadfast in
the Path. Reaching the end of thy journey thou shalt hear the clarions
of omnipotence sounding the cries of victory in chords of which a single
one would shake the earth, but which are lost in the spaces of a world
that hath neither east nor west.

“Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the
torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend
and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the
feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand
that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in
dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?

“Speed thy way through the luminous spheres; behold, admire, hasten!
Flying thus thou canst pause or advance without weariness. Like other
men, thou wouldst fain be plunged forever in these spheres of light and
perfume where now thou art, free of thy swooning body, and where thy
thought alone has utterance. Fly! enjoy for a fleeting moment the wings
thou shalt surely win when Love has grown so perfect in thee that thou
hast no senses left; when thy whole being is all mind, all love. The
higher thy flight the less canst thou see the abysses. There are none in
heaven. Look at the friend who speaks to thee; she who holds thee above
this earth in which are all abysses. Look, behold, contemplate me yet a
moment longer, for never again wilt thou see me, save imperfectly as the
pale twilight of this world may show me to thee.”

Seraphita stood erect, her head with floating hair inclining gently
forward, in that aerial attitude which great painters give to messengers
from heaven; the folds of her raiment fell with the same unspeakable
grace which holds an artist--the man who translates all things into
sentiment--before the exquisite well-known lines of Polyhymnia’s veil.
Then she stretched forth her hand. Wilfrid rose. When he looked at
Seraphita she was lying on the bear’s-skin, her head resting on her
hand, her face calm, her eyes brilliant. Wilfrid gazed at her silently;
but his face betrayed a deferential fear in its almost timid expression.

“Yes, dear,” he said at last, as though he were answering some question;
“we are separated by worlds. I resign myself; I can only adore you. But
what will become of me, poor and alone!”

“Wilfrid, you have Minna.”

He shook his head.

“Do not be so disdainful; woman understands all things through love;
what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees;
when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth
divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of
love.”

“Seraphita, am I worthy to belong to a woman?”

“Ah, now,” she said, smiling, “you are suddenly very modest; is it a
snare? A woman is always so touched to see her weakness glorified. Well,
come and take tea with me the day after to-morrow evening; good Monsieur
Becker will be here, and Minna, the purest and most artless creature
I have known on earth. Leave me now, my friend; I need to make long
prayers and expiate my sins.”

“You, can you commit sin?”

“Poor friend! if we abuse our power, is not that the sin of pride? I
have been very proud to-day. Now leave me, till to-morrow.”

“Till to-morrow,” said Wilfrid faintly, casting a long glance at the
being of whom he desired to carry with him an ineffaceable memory.

Though he wished to go far away, he was held, as it were, outside the
house for some moments, watching the light which shone from all the
windows of the Swedish dwelling.

“What is the matter with me?” he asked himself. “No, she is not a mere
creature, but a whole creation. Of her world, even through veils and
clouds, I have caught echoes like the memory of sufferings healed,
like the dazzling vertigo of dreams in which we hear the plaints of
generations mingling with the harmonies of some higher sphere where all
is Light and all is Love. Am I awake? Do I still sleep? Are these the
eyes before which the luminous space retreated further and further
indefinitely while the eyes followed it? The night is cold, yet my head
is on fire. I will go to the parsonage. With the pastor and his daughter
I shall recover the balance of my mind.”

But still he did not leave the spot whence his eyes could plunge into
Seraphita’s salon. The mysterious creature seemed to him the radiating
centre of a luminous circle which formed an atmosphere about her wider
than that of other beings; whoever entered it felt the compelling
influence of, as it were, a vortex of dazzling light and all consuming
thoughts. Forced to struggle against this inexplicable power, Wilfrid
only prevailed after strong efforts; but when he reached and passed the
inclosing wall of the courtyard, he regained his freedom of will, walked
rapidly towards the parsonage, and was soon beneath the high wooden
arch which formed a sort of peristyle to Monsieur Becker’s dwelling. He
opened the first door, against which the wind had driven the snow, and
knocked on the inner one, saying:--

“Will you let me spend the evening with you, Monsieur Becker?”

“Yes,” cried two voices, mingling their intonations.

Entering the parlor, Wilfrid returned by degrees to real life. He bowed
affectionately to Minna, shook hands with Monsieur Becker, and looked
about at the picture of a home which calmed the convulsions of his
physical nature, in which a phenomenon was taking place analogous to
that which sometimes seizes upon men who have given themselves up
to protracted contemplations. If some strong thought bears upward on
phantasmal wing a man of learning or a poet, isolates him from the
external circumstances which environ him here below, and leads him
forward through illimitable regions where vast arrays of facts become
abstractions, where the greatest works of Nature are but images, then
woe betide him if a sudden noise strikes sharply on his senses and calls
his errant soul back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The
shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,--one of which
partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other
shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies
destruction,--this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this
painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings. The
body receives back the flame that consumes it; the flame has once more
grasped its prey. This fusion, however, does not take place without
convulsions, explosions, tortures; analogous and visible signs of which
may be seen in chemistry, when two antagonistic substances which science
has united separate.

For the last few days whenever Wilfrid entered Seraphita’s presence his
body seemed to fall away from him into nothingness. With a single
glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where
meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision
transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,--each and all have
their own path to the Height, their own guide to reach it, their own
individual sufferings in the dire return. In that sphere alone all veils
are rent away, and the revelation, the awful flaming certainty of an
unknown world, of which the soul brings back mere fragments to this
lower sphere, stands revealed. To Wilfrid one hour passed with Seraphita
was like the sought-for dreams of Theriakis, in which each knot of
nerves becomes the centre of a radiating delight. But he left her
bruised and wearied as some young girl endeavoring to keep step with a
giant.

The cold air, with its stinging flagellations, had begun to still
the nervous tremors which followed the reunion of his two natures, so
powerfully disunited for a time; he was drawn towards the parsonage,
then towards Minna, by the sight of the every-day home life for which
he thirsted as the wandering European thirsts for his native land when
nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced
his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into
a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from
sleep. Monsieur Becker and his daughter accustomed, perhaps, to the
apparent eccentricity of their guest, continued the employments in which
they were engaged.

The parlor was ornamented with a collection of the shells and insects
of Norway. These curiosities, admirably arranged on a background of the
yellow pine which panelled the room, formed, as it were, a rich tapestry
to which the fumes of tobacco had imparted a mellow tone. At the further
end of the room, opposite to the door, was an immense wrought-iron
stove, carefully polished by the serving-woman till it shone like
burnished steel. Seated in a large tapestried armchair near the stove,
before a table, with his feet in a species of muff, Monsieur Becker was
reading a folio volume which was propped against a pile of other books
as on a desk. At his left stood a jug of beer and a glass, at his right
burned a smoky lamp fed by some species of fish-oil. The pastor seemed
about sixty years of age. His face belonged to a type often painted by
Rembrandt; the same small bright eyes, set in wrinkles and surmounted by
thick gray eyebrows; the same white hair escaping in snowy flakes from a
black velvet cap; the same broad, bald brow, and a contour of face
which the ample chin made almost square; and lastly, the same calm
tranquillity, which, to an observer, denoted the possession of some
inward power, be it the supremacy bestowed by money, or the magisterial
influence of the burgomaster, or the consciousness of art, or the
cubic force of blissful ignorance. This fine old man, whose stout body
proclaimed his vigorous health, was wrapped in a dressing-gown of rough
gray cloth plainly bound. Between his lips was a meerschaum pipe,
from which, at regular intervals, he blew the smoke, following with
abstracted vision its fantastic wreathings,--his mind employed, no
doubt, in assimilating through some meditative process the thoughts of
the author whose works he was studying.

On the other side of the stove and near a door which communicated with
the kitchen Minna was indistinctly visible in the haze of the good man’s
smoke, to which she was apparently accustomed. Beside her on a little
table were the implements of household work, a pile of napkins, and
another of socks waiting to be mended, also a lamp like that which shone
on the white page of the book in which the pastor was absorbed. Her
fresh young face, with its delicate outline, expressed an infinite
purity which harmonized with the candor of the white brow and the clear
blue eyes. She sat erect, turning slightly toward the lamp for better
light, unconsciously showing as she did so the beauty of her waist and
bust. She was already dressed for the night in a long robe of white
cotton; a cambric cap, without other ornament than a frill of the same,
confined her hair. Though evidently plunged in some inward meditation,
she counted without a mistake the threads of her napkins or the meshes
of her socks. Sitting thus, she presented the most complete image, the
truest type, of the woman destined for terrestrial labor, whose glance
may piece the clouds of the sanctuary while her thought, humble and
charitable, keeps her ever on the level of man.

Wilfrid had flung himself into a chair between the two tables and
was contemplating with a species of intoxication this picture full of
harmony, to which the clouds of smoke did no despite. The single window
which lighted the parlor during the fine weather was now carefully
closed. An old tapestry, used for a curtain and fastened to a stick,
hung before it in heavy folds. Nothing in the room was picturesque,
nothing brilliant; everything denoted rigorous simplicity, true
heartiness, the ease of unconventional nature, and the habits of a
domestic life which knew neither cares nor troubles. Many a dwelling is
like a dream, the sparkle of passing pleasure seems to hide some ruin
beneath the cold smile of luxury; but this parlor, sublime in reality,
harmonious in tone, diffused the patriarchal ideas of a full and
self-contained existence. The silence was unbroken save by the movements
of the servant in the kitchen engaged in preparing the supper, and
by the sizzling of the dried fish which she was frying in salt butter
according to the custom of the country.

“Will you smoke a pipe?” said the pastor, seizing a moment when he
thought that Wilfrid might listen to him.

“Thank you, no, dear Monsieur Becker,” replied the visitor.

“You seem to suffer more to-day than usual,” said Minna, struck by the
feeble tones of the stranger’s voice.

“I am always so when I leave the chateau.”

Minna quivered.

“A strange being lives there, Monsieur Becker,” he continued after a
pause. “For the six months that I have been in this village I have never
yet dared to question you about her, and even now I do violence to
my feelings in speaking of her. I began by keenly regretting that my
journey in this country was arrested by the winter weather and that I
was forced to remain here. But during the last two months chains have
been forged and riveted which bind me irrevocably to Jarvis, till now
I fear to end my days here. You know how I first met Seraphita, what
impression her look and voice made upon me, and how at last I was
admitted to her home where she receives no one. From the very first day
I have longed to ask you the history of this mysterious being. On that
day began, for me, a series of enchantments.”

“Enchantments!” cried the pastor shaking the ashes of his pipe into an
earthen-ware dish full of sand, “are there enchantments in these days?”

“You, who are carefully studying at this moment that volume of the
‘Incantations’ of Jean Wier, will surely understand the explanation of
my sensations if I try to give it to you,” replied Wilfrid. “If we study
Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we
cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment--giving to that
word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the
only force that exists and which includes all others namely Motion, the
breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe. Species
are too distinctly separated for the human hand to mingle them. The only
miracle of which man is capable is done through the conjunction of
two antagonistic substances. Gunpowder for instance is germane to a
thunderbolt. As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all
creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word
of command. So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the
order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of
man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would
be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic
power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known
generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not
speak of man’s faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to
confine itself within the Word,--a gigantic act on which the common
mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which,
nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by
a word to which they give an inverse power. The smallest atom of their
subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and
in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so
perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that
to them it was easy to apply the same system to the creation of worlds.
The majority of men content themselves with the grain of rice sown in
the first chapter of all the Geneses. Saint John, when he said the
Word was God only complicated the difficulty. But the fructification,
germination, and efflorescence of our ideas is of little consequence if
we compare that property, shared by many men, with the wholly
individual faculty of communicating to that property, by some mysterious
concentration, forces that are more or less active, of carrying it up
to a third, a ninth, or a twenty-seventh power, of making it thus fasten
upon the masses and obtain magical results by condensing the processes
of nature.

“What I mean by enchantments,” continued Wilfrid after a moment’s pause,
“are those stupendous actions taking place between two membranes in the
tissue of the brain. We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual
World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, comparable
only to the terrible power of certain gases in the physical world,
beings who combine with other beings, penetrate them as active agents,
and produce upon them witchcrafts, charms, against which these helpless
slaves are wholly defenceless; they are, in fact, enchanted, brought
under subjection, reduced to a condition of dreadful vassalage. Such
mysterious beings overpower others with the sceptre and the glory of
a superior nature,--acting upon them at times like the torpedo which
electrifies or paralyzes the fisherman, at other times like a dose of
phosphorous which stimulates life and accelerates its propulsion; or
again, like opium, which puts to sleep corporeal nature, disengages the
spirit from every bond, enables it to float above the world and shows
this earth to the spiritual eye as through a prism, extracting from it
the food most needed; or, yet again, like catalepsy, which deadens
all faculties for the sake of one only vision. Miracles, enchantments,
incantations, witchcrafts, spells, and charms, in short, all those
acts improperly termed supernatural, are only possible and can only be
explained by the despotism with which some spirit compels us to feel the
effects of a mysterious optic which increases, or diminishes, or exalts
creation, moves within us as it pleases, deforms or embellishes all
things to our eyes, tears us from heaven, or drags us to hell,--two
terms by which men agree to express the two extremes of joy and misery.

“These phenomena are within us, not without us,” Wilfrid went on. “The
being whom we call Seraphita seems to me one of those rare and terrible
spirits to whom power is given to bind men, to crush nature, to enter
into participation of the occult power of God. The course of her
enchantments over me began on that first day, when silence as to her
was imposed upon me against my will. Each time that I have wished to
question you it seemed as though I were about to reveal a secret of
which I ought to be the incorruptible guardian. Whenever I have tried
to speak, a burning seal has been laid upon my lips, and I myself have
become the involuntary minister of these mysteries. You see me here
to-night, for the hundredth time, bruised, defeated, broken, after
leaving the hallucinating sphere which surrounds that young girl, so
gentle, so fragile to both of you, but to me the cruellest of magicians!
Yes, to me she is like a sorcerer holding in her right hand the
invisible wand that moves the globe, and in her left the thunderbolt
that rends asunder all things at her will. No longer can I look upon her
brow; the light of it is insupportable. I skirt the borders of the abyss
of madness too closely to be longer silent. I must speak. I seize this
moment, when courage comes to me, to resist the power which drags me
onward without inquiring whether or not I have the force to follow. Who
is she? Did you know her young? What of her birth? Had she father and
mother, or was she born of the conjunction of ice and sun? She burns and
yet she freeze; she shows herself and then withdraws; she attracts me
and repulses me; she brings me life, she gives me death; I love her and
yet I hate her! I cannot live thus; let me be wholly in heaven or in
hell!”

Holding his refilled pipe in one hand, and in the other the cover
which he forgot to replace, Monsieur Becker listened to Wilfrid with a
mysterious expression on his face, looking occasionally at his daughter,
who seemed to understand the man’s language as in harmony with the
strange being who inspired it. Wilfrid was splendid to behold at this
moment,--like Hamlet listening to the ghost of his father as it rises
for him alone in the midst of the living.

“This is certainly the language of a man in love,” said the good pastor,
innocently.

“In love!” cried Wilfrid, “yes, to common minds. But, dear Monsieur
Becker, no words can express the frenzy which draws me to the feet of
that unearthly being.”

“Then you do love her?” said Minna, in a tone of reproach.

“Mademoiselle, I feel such extraordinary agitation when I see her, and
such deep sadness when I see her no more, that in any other man what I
feel would be called love. But that sentiment draws those who feel it
ardently together, whereas between her and me a great gulf lies, whose
icy coldness penetrates my very being in her presence; though the
feeling dies away when I see her no longer. I leave her in despair; I
return to her with ardor,--like men of science who seek a secret from
Nature only to be baffled, or like the painter who would fain put life
upon his canvas and strives with all the resources of his art in the
vain attempt.”

“Monsieur, all that you say is true,” replied the young girl, artlessly.

“How can you know, Minna?” asked the old pastor.

“Ah! my father, had you been with us this morning on the summit of the
Falberg, had you seen him praying, you would not ask me that question.
You would say, like Monsieur Wilfrid, that he saw his Seraphita for the
first time in our temple, ‘It is the Spirit of Prayer.’”

These words were followed by a moment’s silence.

“Ah, truly!” said Wilfrid, “she has nothing in common with the creatures
who grovel upon this earth.”

“On the Falberg!” said the old pastor, “how could you get there?”

“I do not know,” replied Minna; “the way is like a dream to me, of which
no more than a memory remains. Perhaps I should hardly believe that I
had been there were it not for this tangible proof.”

She drew the flower from her bosom and showed it to them. All three
gazed at the pretty saxifrage, which was still fresh, and now shone in
the light of the two lamps like a third luminary.

“This is indeed supernatural,” said the old man, astounded at the sight
of a flower blooming in winter.

“A mystery!” cried Wilfrid, intoxicated with its perfume.

“The flower makes me giddy,” said Minna; “I fancy I still hear that
voice,--the music of thought; that I still see the light of that look,
which is Love.”

“I implore you, my dear Monsieur Becker, tell me the history of
Seraphita,--enigmatical human flower,--whose image is before us in this
mysterious bloom.”

“My dear friend,” said the old man, emitting a puff of smoke, “to
explain the birth of that being it is absolutely necessary that
I disperse the clouds which envelop the most obscure of Christian
doctrines. It is not easy to make myself clear when speaking of that
incomprehensible revelation,--the last effulgence of faith that has
shone upon our lump of mud. Do you know Swedenborg?”

“By name only,--of him, of his books, and his religion I know nothing.”

“Then I must relate to you the whole chronicle of Swedenborg.”




CHAPTER III. SERAPHITA-SERAPHITUS


After a pause, during which the pastor seemed to be gathering his
recollections, he continued in the following words:--

“Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Upsala in Sweden, in the month of
January, 1688, according to various authors,--in 1689, according to his
epitaph. His father was Bishop of Skara. Swedenborg lived eighty-five
years; his death occurred in London, March 29, 1772. I use that term to
convey the idea of a simple change of state. According to his disciples,
Swedenborg was seen at Jarvis and in Paris after that date. Allow me,
my dear Monsieur Wilfrid,” said Monsieur Becker, making a gesture to
prevent all interruption, “I relate these facts without either affirming
or denying them. Listen; afterwards you can think and say what you like.
I will inform you when I judge, criticise, and discuss these doctrines,
so as to keep clearly in view my own intellectual neutrality between HIM
and Reason.

“The life of Swedenborg was divided into two parts,” continued the
pastor. “From 1688 to 1745 Baron Emanuel Swedenborg appeared in the
world as a man of vast learning, esteemed and cherished for his virtues,
always irreproachable and constantly useful. While fulfilling high
public functions in Sweden, he published, between 1709 and 1740, several
important works on mineralogy, physics, mathematics, and astronomy,
which enlightened the world of learning. He originated a method of
building docks suitable for the reception of large vessels, and he
wrote many treatises on various important questions, such as the rise
of tides, the theory of the magnet and its qualities, the motion and
position of the earth and planets, and while Assessor in the Royal
College of Mines, on the proper system of working salt mines. He
discovered means to construct canal-locks or sluices; and he also
discovered and applied the simplest methods of extracting ore and of
working metals. In fact he studied no science without advancing it. In
youth he learned Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, also the oriental languages,
with which he became so familiar that many distinguished scholars
consulted him, and he was able to decipher the vestiges of the oldest
known books of Scripture, namely: ‘The Wars of Jehovah’ and ‘The
Enunciations,’ spoken of by Moses (Numbers xxi. 14, 15, 27-30), also
by Joshua, Jeremiah, and Samuel,--‘The Wars of Jehovah’ being the
historical part and ‘The Enunciations’ the prophetical part of the
Mosaical Books anterior to Genesis. Swedenborg even affirms that ‘the
Book of Jasher,’ the Book of the Righteous, mentioned by Joshua, was
in existence in Eastern Tartary, together with the doctrine of
Correspondences. A Frenchman has lately, so they tell me, justified
these statements of Swedenborg, by the discovery at Bagdad of several
portions of the Bible hitherto unknown to Europe. During the widespread
discussion on animal magnetism which took its rise in Paris, and in
which most men of Western science took an active part about the year
1785, Monsieur le Marquis de Thome vindicated the memory of Swedenborg
by calling attention to certain assertions made by the Commission
appointed by the King of France to investigate the subject. These
gentlemen declared that no theory of magnetism existed, whereas
Swedenborg had studied and promulgated it ever since the year 1720.
Monsieur de Thome seizes this opportunity to show the reason why so many
men of science relegated Swedenborg to oblivion while they delved into
his treasure-house and took his facts to aid their work. ‘Some of the
most illustrious of these men,’ said Monsieur de Thome, alluding to
the ‘Theory of the Earth’ by Buffon, ‘have had the meanness to wear the
plumage of the noble bird and refuse him all acknowledgment’; and he
proved, by masterly quotations drawn from the encyclopaedic works of
Swedenborg, that the great prophet had anticipated by over a century the
slow march of human science. It suffices to read his philosophical and
mineralogical works to be convinced of this. In one passage he is
seen as the precursor of modern chemistry by the announcement that the
productions of organized nature are decomposable and resolve into two
simple principles; also that water, air, and fire are _not elements_. In
another, he goes in a few words to the heart of magnetic mysteries and
deprives Mesmer of the honors of a first knowledge of them.

“There,” said Monsieur Becker, pointing to a long shelf against the
wall between the stove and the window on which were ranged books of all
sizes, “behold him! here are seventeen works from his pen, of which one,
his ‘Philosophical and Mineralogical Works,’ published in 1734, is in
three folio volumes. These productions, which prove the incontestable
knowledge of Swedenborg, were given to me by Monsieur Seraphitus, his
cousin and the father of Seraphita.

“In 1740,” continued Monsieur Becker, after a slight pause, “Swedenborg
fell into a state of absolute silence, from which he emerged to bid
farewell to all his earthly occupations; after which his thoughts turned
exclusively to the Spiritual Life. He received the first commands of
heaven in 1745, and he thus relates the nature of the vocation to
which he was called: One evening, in London, after dining with a great
appetite, a thick white mist seemed to fill his room. When the
vapor dispersed a creature in human form rose from one corner of the
apartment, and said in a stern tone, ‘Do not eat so much.’ He refrained.
The next night the same man returned, radiant in light, and said to him,
‘I am sent of God, who has chosen you to explain to men the meaning of
his Word and his Creation. I will tell you what to write.’ The vision
lasted but a few moments. The _angel_ was clothed in purple. During that
night the eyes of his _inner man_ were opened, and he was forced to
look into the heavens, into the world of spirits, and into hell,--three
separate spheres; where he encountered persons of his acquaintance who
had departed from their human form, some long since, others lately.
Thenceforth Swedenborg lived wholly in the spiritual life, remaining in
this world only as the messenger of God. His mission was ridiculed by
the incredulous, but his conduct was plainly that of a being superior
to humanity. In the first place, though limited in means to the bare
necessaries of life, he gave away enormous sums, and publicly, in
several cities, restored the fortunes of great commercial houses
when they were on the brink of failure. No one ever appealed to his
generosity who was not immediately satisfied. A sceptical Englishman,
determined to know the truth, followed him to Paris, and relates that
there his doors stood always open. One day a servant complained of this
apparent negligence, which laid him open to suspicion of thefts
that might be committed by others. ‘He need feel no anxiety,’ said
Swedenborg, smiling. ‘But I do not wonder at his fear; he cannot see the
guardian who protects my door.’ In fact, no matter in what country he
made his abode he never closed his doors, and nothing was ever
stolen from him. At Gottenburg--a town situated some sixty miles from
Stockholm--he announced, eight days before the news arrived by courier,
the conflagration which ravaged Stockholm, and the exact time at which
it took place. The Queen of Sweden wrote to her brother, the King, at
Berlin, that one of her ladies-in-waiting, who was ordered by the courts
to pay a sum of money which she was certain her husband had paid before
his death, went to Swedenborg and begged him to ask her husband where
she could find proof of the payment. The following day Swedenborg,
having done as the lady requested, pointed out the place where the
receipt would be found. He also begged the deceased to appear to
his wife, and the latter saw her husband in a dream, wrapped in a
dressing-gown which he wore just before his death; and he showed her the
paper in the place indicated by Swedenborg, where it had been securely
put away. At another time, embarking from London in a vessel commanded
by Captain Dixon, he overheard a lady asking if there were plenty of
provisions on board. ‘We do not want a great quantity,’ he said; ‘in
eight days and two hours we shall reach Stockholm,’--which actually
happened. This peculiar state of vision as to the things of the
earth--into which Swedenborg could put himself at will, and
which astonished those about him--was, nevertheless, but a feeble
representative of his faculty of looking into heaven.

“Not the least remarkable of his published visions is that in which he
relates his journeys through the Astral Regions; his descriptions
cannot fail to astonish the reader, partly through the crudity of their
details. A man whose scientific eminence is incontestable, and who
united in his own person powers of conception, will, and imagination,
would surely have invented better if he had invented at all. The
fantastic literature of the East offers nothing that can give an idea
of this astounding work, full of the essence of poetry, if it is
permissible to compare a work of faith with one of oriental fancy. The
transportation of Swedenborg by the Angel who served as guide to this
first journey is told with a sublimity which exceeds, by the distance
which God has placed betwixt the earth and the sun, the great epics of
Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante. This description, which serves in
fact as an introduction to his work on the Astral Regions, has never
been published; it is among the oral traditions left by Swedenborg to
the three disciples who were nearest to his heart. Monsieur Silverichm
has written them down. Monsieur Seraphitus endeavored more than once to
talk to me about them; but the recollection of his cousin’s words was so
burning a memory that he always stopped short at the first sentence and
became lost in a revery from which I could not rouse him.”

The old pastor sighed as he continued: “The baron told me that the
argument by which the Angel proved to Swedenborg that these bodies are
not made to wander through space puts all human science out of sight
beneath the grandeur of a divine logic. According to the Seer, the
inhabitants of Jupiter will not cultivate the sciences, which they call
darkness; those of Mercury abhor the expression of ideas by speech,
which seems to them too material,--their language is ocular; those of
Saturn are continually tempted by evil spirits; those of the Moon are as
small as six-year-old children, their voices issue from the abdomen, on
which they crawl; those of Venus are gigantic in height, but stupid, and
live by robbery,--although a part of this latter planet is inhabited by
beings of great sweetness, who live in the love of Good. In short, he
describes the customs and morals of all the peoples attached to the
different globes, and explains the general meaning of their existence as
related to the universe in terms so precise, giving explanations which
agree so well with their visible evolutions in the system of the world,
that some day, perhaps, scientific men will come to drink of these
living waters.

“Here,” said Monsieur Becker, taking down a book and opening it at a
mark, “here are the words with which he ended this work:--

“‘If any man doubts that I was transported through a vast number of
Astral Regions, let him recall my observation of the distances in that
other life, namely, that they exist only in relation to the external
state of man; now, being transformed within like unto the Angelic
Spirits of those Astral Spheres, I was able to understand them.’

“The circumstances to which we of this canton owe the presence among
us of Baron Seraphitus, the beloved cousin of Swedenborg, enabled me to
know all the events of the extraordinary life of that prophet. He has
lately been accused of imposture in certain quarters of Europe, and the
public prints reported the following fact based on a letter written
by the Chevalier Baylon. Swedenborg, they said, informed by certain
senators of a secret correspondence of the late Queen of Sweden with her
brother, the Prince of Prussia, revealed his knowledge of the secrets
contained in that correspondence to the Queen, making her believe he
had obtained this knowledge by supernatural means. A man worthy of all
confidence, Monsieur Charles-Leonhard de Stahlhammer, captain in
the Royal guard and knight of the Sword, answered the calumny with a
convincing letter.”

The pastor opened a drawer of his table and looked through a number of
papers until he found a gazette which he held out to Wilfrid, asking him
to read aloud the following letter:--

Stockholm, May 18, 1788.

  I have read with amazement a letter which purports to relate the
  interview of the famous Swedenborg with Queen Louisa-Ulrika. The
  circumstances therein stated are wholly false; and I hope the
  writer will excuse me for showing him by the following faithful
  narration, which can be proved by the testimony of many
  distinguished persons then present and still living, how
  completely he has been deceived.

  In 1758, shortly after the death of the Prince of Prussia
  Swedenborg came to court, where he was in the habit of attending
  regularly. He had scarcely entered the queen’s presence before she
  said to him: “Well, Mr. Assessor, have you seen my brother?”
   Swedenborg answered no, and the queen rejoined: “If you do see
  him, greet him for me.” In saying this she meant no more than a
  pleasant jest, and had no thought whatever of asking him for
  information about her brother. Eight days later (not twenty-four
  as stated, nor was the audience a private one), Swedenborg again
  came to court, but so early that the queen had not left her
  apartment called the White Room, where she was conversing with her
  maids-of-honor and other ladies attached to the court. Swedenborg
  did not wait until she came forth, but entered the said room and
  whispered something in her ear. The queen, overcome with
  amazement, was taken ill, and it was some time before she
  recovered herself. When she did so she said to those about her:
  “Only God and my brother knew the thing that he has just spoken
  of.” She admitted that it related to her last correspondence with
  the prince on a subject which was known to them alone. I cannot
  explain how Swedenborg came to know the contents of that letter,
  but I can affirm on my honor, that neither Count H---- (as the
  writer of the article states) nor any other person intercepted, or
  read, the queen’s letters. The senate allowed her to write to her
  brother in perfect security, considering the correspondence as of
  no interest to the State. It is evident that the author of the
  said article is ignorant of the character of Count H----. This
  honored gentleman, who has done many important services to his
  country, unites the qualities of a noble heart to gifts of mind,
  and his great age has not yet weakened these precious possessions.
  During his whole administration he added the weight of scrupulous
  integrity to his enlightened policy and openly declared himself
  the enemy of all secret intrigues and underhand dealings, which he
  regarded as unworthy means to attain an end. Neither did the
  writer of that article understand the Assessor Swedenborg. The
  only weakness of that essentially honest man was a belief in the
  apparition of spirits; but I knew him for many years, and I can
  affirm that he was as fully convinced that he met and talked with
  spirits as I am that I am writing at this moment. As a citizen and
  as a friend his integrity was absolute; he abhorred deception and
  led the most exemplary of lives. The version which the Chevalier
  Baylon gave of these facts is, therefore, entirely without
  justification; the visit stated to have been made to Swedenborg in
  the night-time by Count H---- and Count T---- is hereby
  contradicted. In conclusion, the writer of the letter may rest
  assured that I am not a follower of Swedenborg. The love of truth
  alone impels me to give this faithful account of a fact which has
  been so often stated with details that are entirely false. I
  certify to the truth of what I have written by adding my
  signature.

                                  Charles-Leonhard de Stahlhammer.


“The proofs which Swedenborg gave of his mission to the royal families
of Sweden and Prussia were no doubt the foundation of the belief in his
doctrines which is prevalent at the two courts,” said Monsieur Becker,
putting the gazette into the drawer. “However,” he continued, “I shall
not tell you all the facts of his visible and material life; indeed his
habits prevented them from being fully known. He lived a hidden life;
not seeking either riches or fame. He was even noted for a sort of
repugnance to making proselytes; he opened his mind to few persons, and
never showed his external powers of second-sight to any who were not
eminent in faith, wisdom, and love. He could recognize at a glance the
state of the soul of every person who approached him, and those whom he
desired to reach with his inward language he converted into Seers. After
the year 1745, his disciples never saw him do a single thing from any
human motive. One man alone, a Swedish priest, named Mathesius, set
afloat a story that he went mad in London in 1744. But a eulogium on
Swedenborg prepared with minute care as to all the known events of his
life, was pronounced after his death in 1772 on behalf of the Royal
Academy of Sciences in the Hall of the Nobles at Stockholm, by Monsieur
Sandels, counsellor of the Board of Mines. A declaration made before the
Lord Mayor of London gives the details of his last illness and death,
in which he received the ministrations of Monsieur Ferelius a Swedish
priest of the highest standing, and pastor of the Swedish Church in
London, Mathesius being his assistant. All persons present attested that
so far from denying the value of his writings Swedenborg firmly asserted
their truth. ‘In one hundred years,’ Monsieur Ferelius quotes him as
saying, ‘my doctrine will guide the _Church_.’ He predicted the day
and hour of his death. On that day, Sunday, March 29, 1772, hearing the
clock strike, he asked what time it was. ‘Five o’clock’ was the answer.
‘It is well,’ he answered; ‘thank you, God bless you.’ Ten minutes later
he tranquilly departed, breathing a gentle sigh. Simplicity, moderation,
and solitude were the features of his life. When he had finished writing
any of his books he sailed either for London or for Holland, where he
published them, and never spoke of them again. He published in this
way twenty-seven different treatises, all written, he said, from the
dictation of Angels. Be it true or false, few men have been strong
enough to endure the flames of oral illumination.

“There they all are,” said Monsieur Becker, pointing to a second shelf
on which were some sixty volumes. “The treatises on which the Divine
Spirit casts its most vivid gleams are seven in number, namely: ‘Heaven
and Hell’; ‘Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine
Wisdom’; ‘Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Providence’; ‘The
Apocalypse Revealed’; ‘Conjugial Love and its Chaste Delights’; ‘The
True Christian Religion’; and ‘An Exposition of the Internal Sense.’
Swedenborg’s explanation of the Apocalypse begins with these words,”
 said Monsieur Becker, taking down and opening the volume nearest to him:
“‘Herein I have written nothing of mine own; I speak as I am bidden by
the Lord, who said, through the same angel, to John: “Thou shalt not
seal the sayings of this Prophecy.”’ (Revelation xxii. 10.)

“My dear Monsieur Wilfrid,” said the old man, looking at his guest, “I
often tremble in every limb as I read, during the long winter evenings
the awe-inspiring works in which this man declares with perfect
artlessness the wonders that are revealed to him. ‘I have seen,’ he
says, ‘Heaven and the Angels. The spiritual man sees his spiritual
fellows far better than the terrestrial man sees the men of earth. In
describing the wonders of heaven and beneath the heavens I obey the
Lord’s command. Others have the right to believe me or not as they
choose. I cannot put them into the state in which God has put me; it
is not in my power to enable them to converse with Angels, nor to work
miracles within their understanding; they alone can be the instrument of
their rise to angelic intercourse. It is now twenty-eight years since
I have lived in the Spiritual world with angels, and on earth with men;
for it pleased God to open the eyes of my spirit as he did that of Paul,
and of Daniel and Elisha.’

“And yet,” continued the pastor, thoughtfully, “certain persons have
had visions of the spiritual world through the complete detachment which
somnambulism produces between their external form and their inner being.
‘In this state,’ says Swedenborg in his treatise on Angelic Wisdom
(No. 257) ‘Man may rise into the region of celestial light because, his
corporeal senses being abolished, the influence of heaven acts without
hindrance on his inner man.’ Many persons who do not doubt that
Swedenborg received celestial revelations think that his writings are
not all the result of divine inspiration. Others insist on absolute
adherence to him; while admitting his many obscurities, they believe
that the imperfection of earthly language prevented the prophet from
clearly revealing those spiritual visions whose clouds disperse to
the eyes of those whom faith regenerates; for, to use the words of his
greatest disciple, ‘Flesh is but an external propagation.’ To poets and
to writers his presentation of the marvellous is amazing; to Seers it
is simply reality. To some Christians his descriptions have seemed
scandalous. Certain critics have ridiculed the celestial substance
of his temples, his golden palaces, his splendid cities where angels
disport themselves; they laugh at his groves of miraculous trees, his
gardens where the flowers speak and the air is white, and the mystical
stones, the sard, carbuncle, chrysolite, chrysoprase, jacinth,
chalcedony, beryl, the Urim and Thummim, are endowed with motion,
express celestial truths, and reply by variations of light to questions
put to them [‘True Christian Religion,’ 219). Many noble souls will not
admit his spiritual worlds where colors are heard in delightful concert,
where language flames and flashes, where the Word is writ in pointed
spiral letters [‘True Christian Religion,’ 278). Even in the North some
writers have laughed at the gates of pearl, and the diamonds which
stud the floors and walls of his New Jerusalem, where the most ordinary
utensils are made of the rarest substances of the globe. ‘But,’ say his
disciples, ‘because such things are sparsely scattered on this earth
does it follow that they are not abundant in other worlds? On earth
they are terrestrial substances, whereas in heaven they assume celestial
forms and are in keeping with angels.’ In this connection Swedenborg
has used the very words of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘If I have told you
earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of
heavenly things?’

“Monsieur,” continued the pastor, with an emphatic gesture, “I have read
the whole of Swedenborg’s works; and I say it with pride, because I have
done it and yet retained my reason. In reading him men either miss his
meaning or become Seers like him. Though I have evaded both extremes, I
have often experienced unheard-of delights, deep emotions, inward joys,
which alone can reveal to us the plenitude of truth,--the evidence of
celestial Light. All things here below seem small indeed when the soul
is lost in the perusal of these Treatises. It is impossible not to be
amazed when we think that in the short space of thirty years this man
wrote and published, on the truths of the Spiritual World, twenty-five
quarto volumes, composed in Latin, of which the shortest has five
hundred pages, all of them printed in small type. He left, they say,
twenty others in London, bequeathed to his nephew, Monsieur Silverichm,
formerly almoner to the King of Sweden. Certainly a man who, between the
ages of twenty and sixty, had already exhausted himself in publishing
a series of encyclopaedical works, must have received supernatural
assistance in composing these later stupendous treatises, at an age,
too, when human vigor is on the wane. You will find in these writings
thousands of propositions, all numbered, none of which have been
refuted. Throughout we see method and precision; the presence of the
spirit issuing and flowing down from a single fact,--the existence of
angels. His ‘True Christian Religion,’ which sums up his whole doctrine
and is vigorous with light, was conceived and written at the age of
eighty-three. In fact, his amazing vigor and omniscience are not denied
by any of his critics, not even by his enemies.

“Nevertheless,” said Monsieur Becker, slowly, “though I have drunk deep
in this torrent of divine light, God has not opened the eyes of my inner
being, and I judge these writings by the reason of an unregenerated man.
I have often felt that the _inspired_ Swedenborg must have misunderstood
the Angels. I have laughed over certain visions which, according to his
disciples, I ought to have believed with veneration. I have failed to
imagine the spiral writing of the Angels or their golden belts, on
which the gold is of great or lesser thickness. If, for example, this
statement, ‘Some angels are solitary,’ affected me powerfully for a
time, I was, on reflection, unable to reconcile this solitude with their
marriages. I have not understood why the Virgin Mary should continue to
wear blue satin garments in heaven. I have even dared to ask myself why
those gigantic demons, Enakim and Hephilim, came so frequently to fight
the cherubim on the apocalyptic plains of Armageddon; and I cannot
explain to my own mind how Satans can argue with Angels. Monsieur le
Baron Seraphitus assured me that those details concerned only the angels
who live on earth in human form. The visions of the prophet are
often blurred with grotesque figures. One of his spiritual tales,
or ‘Memorable relations,’ as he called them, begins thus: ‘I see the
spirits assembling, they have hats upon their heads.’ In another of
these Memorabilia he receives from heaven a bit of paper, on which he
saw, he says, the hieroglyphics of the primitive peoples, which were
composed of curved lines traced from the finger-rings that are worn in
heaven. However, perhaps I am wrong; possibly the material absurdities
with which his works are strewn have spiritual significations.
Otherwise, how shall we account for the growing influence of his
religion? His church numbers to-day more than seven hundred thousand
believers,--as many in the United States of America as in England, where
there are seven thousand Swedenborgians in the city of Manchester alone.
Many men of high rank in knowledge and in social position in Germany, in
Prussia, and in the Northern kingdoms have publicly adopted the beliefs
of Swedenborg; which, I may remark, are more comforting than those of
all other Christian communions. I wish I had the power to explain to you
clearly in succinct language the leading points of the doctrine on which
Swedenborg founded his church; but I fear such a summary, made from
recollection, would be necessarily defective. I shall, therefore,
allow myself to speak only of those ‘Arcana’ which concern the birth of
Seraphita.”

Here Monsieur Becker paused, as though composing his mind to gather up
his ideas. Presently he continued, as follows:--

“After establishing mathematically that man lives eternally in spheres
of either a lower or a higher grade, Swedenborg applies the term
‘Spiritual Angels’ to beings who in this world are prepared for heaven,
where they become angels. According to him, God has not created angels;
none exist who have not been men upon the earth. The earth is the
nursery-ground of heaven. The Angels are therefore not Angels as
such [‘Angelic Wisdom,’ 57), they are transformed through their close
conjunction with God; which conjunction God never refuses, because the
essence of God is not negative, but essentially active. The spiritual
angels pass through three natures of love, because man is only
regenerated through successive stages [‘True Religion’). First, the
_love of self_: the supreme expression of this love is human genius,
whose works are worshipped. Next, _love of life_: this love produces
prophets,--great men whom the world accepts as guides and proclaims
to be divine. Lastly, _love of heaven_, and this creates the Spiritual
Angel. These angels are, so to speak, the flowers of humanity, which
culminates in them and works for that culmination. They must possess
either the love of heaven or the wisdom of heaven, but always Love
before Wisdom.

“Thus the transformation of the natural man is into Love. To reach this
first degree, his previous existences must have passed through Hope and
Charity, which prepare him for Faith and Prayer. The ideas acquired
by the exercise of these virtues are transmitted to each of the human
envelopes within which are hidden the metamorphoses of the _inner
being_; for nothing is separate, each existence is necessary to the
other existences. Hope cannot advance without Charity, nor Faith
without Prayer; they are the four fronts of a solid square. ‘One virtue
missing,’ he said, ‘and the Spiritual Angel is like a broken pearl.’
Each of these existences is therefore a circle in which revolves the
celestial riches of the inner being. The perfection of the Spiritual
Angels comes from this mysterious progression in which nothing is lost
of the high qualities that are successfully acquired to attain each
glorious incarnation; for at each transformation they cast away
unconsciously the flesh and its errors. When the man lives in Love he
has shed all evil passions: Hope, Charity, Faith, and Prayer have, in
the words of Isaiah, purged the dross of his inner being, which can
never more be polluted by earthly affections. Hence the grand saying
of Christ quoted by Saint Matthew, ‘Lay up for yourselves treasures
in Heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,’ and those still
grander words: ‘If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I
have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect.’

“The second transformation of man is to Wisdom. Wisdom is the
understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by
Love. The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all
vanquished terrestrial passions; it loves God blindly. But the Spirit of
Wisdom has risen to understanding and knows why it loves. The wings of
the one are spread and bear the spirit to God; the wings of the other
are held down by the awe that comes of understanding: the spirit knows
God. The one longs incessantly to see God and to fly to Him; the other
attains to Him and trembles. The union effected between the Spirit of
Love and the Spirit of Wisdom carries the human being into a Divine
state during which time his soul is _woman_ and his body _man_, the last
human manifestation in which the Spirit conquers Form, or Form still
struggles against the Spirit,--for Form, that is, the flesh, is
ignorant, rebels, and desires to continue gross. This supreme trial
creates untold sufferings seen by Heaven alone,--the agony of Christ in
the Garden of Olives.

“After death the first heaven opens to this dual and purified human
nature. Therefore it is that man dies in despair while the Spirit
dies in ecstasy. Thus, the _natural_, the state of beings not yet
regenerated; the _spiritual_, the state of those who have become Angelic
Spirits, and the _divine_, the state in which the Angel exists before
he breaks from his covering of flesh, are the three degrees of existence
through which man enters heaven. One of Swedenborg’s thoughts expressed
in his own words will explain to you with wonderful clearness the
difference between the _natural_ and the _spiritual_. ‘To the minds of
men,’ he says, ‘the Natural passes into the Spiritual; they regard the
world under its visible aspects, they perceive it only as it can be
realized by their senses. But to the apprehension of Angelic Spirits,
the Spiritual passes into the Natural; they regard the world in its
inward essence and not in its form.’ Thus human sciences are but
analyses of form. The man of science as the world goes is purely
external like his knowledge; his inner being is only used to preserve
his aptitude for the perception of external truths. The Angelic Spirit
goes far beyond that; his knowledge is the thought of which human
science is but the utterance; he derives that knowledge from the Logos,
and learns the law of _correspondences_ by which the world is placed
in unison with heaven. The _word of God_ was wholly written by pure
Correspondences, and covers an esoteric or spiritual meaning, which
according to the science of Correspondences, cannot be understood.
‘There exist,’ says Swedenborg [‘Celestial Doctrine’ 26), ‘innumerable
Arcana within the hidden meaning of the Correspondences. Thus the men
who scoff at the books of the Prophets where the Word is enshrined are
as densely ignorant as those other men who know nothing of a science and
yet ridicule its truths. To know the Correspondences which exist between
the things visible and ponderable in the terrestrial world and the
things invisible and imponderable in the spiritual world, is to hold
heaven within our comprehension. All the objects of the manifold
creations having emanated from God necessarily enfold a hidden meaning;
according, indeed, to the grand thought of Isaiah, ‘The earth is a
garment.’

“This mysterious link between Heaven and the smallest atoms of created
matter constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum, and
his treatise on the ‘Celestial Arcana’ in which he explains the
correspondences or significances of the Natural with, and to, the
Spiritual, giving, to use the words of Jacob Boehm, the sign and seal
of all things, occupies not less than sixteen volumes containing thirty
thousand propositions. ‘This marvellous knowledge of Correspondences
which the goodness of God granted to Swedenborg,’ says one of his
disciples, ‘is the secret of the interest which draws men to his works.
According to him, all things are derived from heaven, all things lead
back to heaven. His writings are sublime and clear; he speaks in heaven,
and earth hears him. Take one of his sentences by itself and a volume
could be made of it’; and the disciple quotes the following passages
taken from a thousand others that would answer the same purpose.

“‘The kingdom of heaven,’ says Swedenborg [‘Celestial Arcana’), ‘is the
kingdom of motives. _Action_ is born in heaven, thence into the world,
and, by degrees, to the infinitely remote parts of earth. Terrestrial
effects being thus linked to celestial causes, all things are
_correspondent_ and _significant_. Man is the means of union between the
Natural and the Spiritual.’

“The Angelic Spirits therefore know the very nature of the
Correspondences which link to heaven all earthly things; they know,
too, the inner meaning of the prophetic words which foretell their
evolutions. Thus to these Spirits everything here below has its
significance; the tiniest flower is a thought,--a life which corresponds
to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant
intuition. To them Adultery and the excesses spoken of in Scripture and
by the Prophets, often garbled by self-styled scholars, mean the state
of those souls which in this world persist in tainting themselves with
earthly affections, thus compelling their divorce from Heaven. Clouds
signify the veil of the Most High. Torches, shew-bread, horses and
horsemen, harlots, precious stones, in short, everything named in
Scripture, has to them a clear-cut meaning, and reveals the future of
terrestrial facts in their relation to Heaven. They penetrate the
truths contained in the Revelation of Saint John the divine, which human
science has subsequently demonstrated and proved materially; such, for
instance, as the following [‘big,’ said Swedenborg, ‘with many human
sciences’): ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven
and the first earth were passed away’ (Revelation xxi. 1). These Spirits
know the supper at which the flesh of kings and the flesh of all men,
free and bond, is eaten, to which an Angel standing in the sun has
bidden them. They see the winged woman, clothed with the sun, and the
mailed man. ‘The horse of the Apocalypse,’ says Swedenborg, ‘is the
visible image of human intellect ridden by Death, for it bears within
itself the elements of its own destruction.’ Moreover, they can
distinguish beings concealed under forms which to ignorant eyes
would seem fantastic. When a man is disposed to receive the prophetic
afflation of Correspondences, it rouses within him a perception of the
Word; he comprehends that the creations are transformations only; his
intellect is sharpened, a burning thirst takes possession of him which
only Heaven can quench. He conceives, according to the greater or lesser
perfection of his inner being, the power of the Angelic Spirits; and he
advances, led by Desire (the least imperfect state of unregenerated man)
towards Hope, the gateway to the world of Spirits, whence he reaches
Prayer, which gives him the Key of Heaven.

“What being here below would not desire to render himself worthy of
entrance into the sphere of those who live in secret by Love and Wisdom?
Here on earth, during their lifetime, such spirits remain pure; they
neither see, nor think, nor speak like other men. There are two ways by
which perception comes,--one internal, the other external. Man is wholly
external, the Angelic Spirit wholly internal. The Spirit goes to
the depth of Numbers, possesses a full sense of them, knows their
significances. It controls Motion, and by reason of its ubiquity it
shares in all things. ‘An Angel,’ says Swedenborg, ‘is ever present to
a man when desired’ [‘Angelic Wisdom’); for the Angel has the gift of
detaching himself from his body, and he sees into heaven as the
prophets and as Swedenborg himself saw into it. ‘In this state,’ writes
Swedenborg [‘True Religion,’ 136), ‘the spirit of a man may move from
one place to another, his body remaining where it is,--a condition in
which I lived for over twenty-six years.’ It is thus that we should
interpret all Biblical statements which begin, ‘The Spirit led me.’
Angelic Wisdom is to human wisdom what the innumerable forces of nature
are to its action, which is one. All things live again, and move and
have their being in the Spirit, which is in God. Saint Paul expresses
this truth when he says, ‘In Deo sumus, movemur, et vivimus,’--we live,
we act, we are in God.

“Earth offers no hindrance to the Angelic Spirit, just as the Word
offers him no obscurity. His approaching divinity enables him to see the
thought of God veiled in the Logos, just as, living by his inner being,
the Spirit is in communion with the hidden meaning of all things on this
earth. Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of
the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able
to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science
depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love
has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the
Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things
have a voice for the Spirit. Spirits are in the secret of the harmony of
all creations with each other; they comprehend the spirit of sound, the
spirit of color, the spirit of vegetable life; they can question the
mineral, and the mineral makes answer to their thoughts. What to them
are sciences and the treasures of the earth when they grasp all things
by the eye at all moments, when the worlds which absorb the minds of so
many men are to them but the last step from which they spring to God?
Love of heaven, or the Wisdom of heaven, is made manifest to them by a
circle of light which surrounds them, and is visible to the Elect.
Their innocence, of which that of children is a symbol, possesses,
nevertheless, a knowledge which children have not; they are both
innocent and learned. ‘And,’ says Swedenborg, ‘the innocence of Heaven
makes such an impression upon the soul that those whom it affects keep
a rapturous memory of it which lasts them all their lives, as I myself
have experienced. It is perhaps sufficient,’ he goes on, ‘to have only a
minimum perception of it to be forever changed, to long to enter Heaven
and the sphere of Hope.’

“His doctrine of Marriage can be reduced to the following words: ‘The
Lord has taken the beauty and the grace of the life of man and bestowed
them upon woman. When man is not reunited to this beauty and this grace
of his life, he is harsh, sad, and sullen; when he is reunited to them
he is joyful and complete.’ The Angels are ever at the perfect point
of beauty. Marriages are celebrated by wondrous ceremonies. In these
unions, which produce no children, man contributes the _understanding_,
woman the _will_; they become one being, one Flesh here below, and pass
to heaven clothed in the celestial form. On this earth, the natural
attraction of the sexes towards enjoyment is an Effect which allures,
fatigues and disgusts; but in the form celestial the pair, now _one_ in
Spirit find within theirself a ceaseless source of joy. Swedenborg was
led to see these nuptials of the Spirits, which in the words of Saint
Luke (xx. 35) are neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and which
inspire none but spiritual pleasures. An Angel offered to make him
witness of such a marriage and bore him thither on his wings (the wings
are a symbol and not a reality). The Angel clothed him in a wedding
garment and when Swedenborg, finding himself thus robed in light, asked
why, the answer was: ‘For these events, our garments are illuminated;
they shine; they are made nuptial.’ [‘Conjugial Love,’ 19, 20, 21.) Then
he saw the two Angels, one coming from the South, the other from the
East; the Angel of the South was in a chariot drawn by two white horses,
with reins of the color and brilliance of the dawn; but lo, when they
were near him in the sky, chariot and horses vanished. The Angel of the
East, clothed in crimson, and the Angel of the South, in purple, drew
together, like breaths, and mingled: one was the Angel of Love, the
other the Angel of Wisdom. Swedenborg’s guide told him that the two
Angels had been linked together on earth by an inward friendship and
ever united though separated in life by great distances. Consent, the
essence of all good marriage upon earth, is the habitual state of Angels
in Heaven. Love is the light of their world. The eternal rapture of
Angels comes from the faculty that God communicates to them to
render back to Him the joy they feel through Him. This reciprocity of
infinitude forms their life. They become infinite by participating of
the essence of God, who generates Himself by Himself.

“The immensity of the Heavens where the Angels dwell is such that if man
were endowed with sight as rapid as the darting of light from the sun to
the earth, and if he gazed throughout eternity, his eyes could not reach
the horizon, nor find an end. Light alone can give an idea of the joys
of heaven. ‘It is,’ says Swedenborg [‘Angelic Wisdom,’ 7, 25, 26, 27),
‘a vapor of the virtue of God, a pure emanation of His splendor, beside
which our greatest brilliance is obscurity. It can compass all; it can
renew all, and is never absorbed: it environs the Angel and unites him
to God by infinite joys which multiply infinitely of themselves. This
Light destroys whosoever is not prepared to receive it. No one here
below, nor yet in Heaven can see God and live. This is the meaning of
the saying (Exodus xix. 12, 13, 21-23) “Take heed to yourselves that ye
go not up into the mount--lest ye break through unto the Lord to gaze,
and many perish.” And again (Exodus xxxiv. 29-35), “When Moses came down
from Mount Sinai with the two Tables of testimony in his hand, his face
shone, so that he put a veil upon it when he spake with the people, lest
any of them die.” The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ likewise revealed
the light surrounding the Messengers from on high and the ineffable joys
of the Angels who are forever imbued with it. “His face,” says Saint
Matthew (xvii. 1-5), “did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as
the light--and a bright cloud overshadowed them.”’

“When a planet contains only those beings who reject the Lord, when his
word is ignored, then the Angelic Spirits are gathered together by the
four winds, and God sends forth an Exterminating Angel to change the
face of the refractory earth, which in the immensity of this universe is
to Him what an unfruitful seed is to Nature. Approaching the globe, this
Exterminating Angel, borne by a comet, causes the planet to turn upon
its axis, and the lands lately covered by the seas reappear, adorned in
freshness and obedient to the laws proclaimed in Genesis; the Word of
God is once more powerful on this new earth, which everywhere exhibits
the effects of terrestrial waters and celestial flames. The light
brought by the Angel from On High, causes the sun to pale. ‘Then,’ says
Isaiah, (xix. 20) ‘men will hide in the clefts of the rock and roll
themselves in the dust of the earth.’ ‘They will cry to the mountains’
(Revelation), ‘Fall on us! and to the seas, Swallow us up! Hide us from
the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the
Lamb!’ The Lamb is the great figure and hope of the Angels misjudged and
persecuted here below. Christ himself has said, ‘Blessed are those who
mourn! Blessed are the simple-hearted! Blessed are they that love!’--All
Swedenborg is there! Suffer, Believe, Love. To love truly must we not
suffer? must we not believe? Love begets Strength, Strength bestows
Wisdom, thence Intelligence; for Strength and Wisdom demand Will. To
be intelligent, is not that to Know, to Wish, and to Will,--the three
attributes of the Angelic Spirit? ‘If the universe has a meaning,’
Monsieur Saint-Martin said to me when I met him during a journey which
he made in Sweden, ‘surely this is the one most worthy of God.’

“But, Monsieur,” continued the pastor after a thoughtful pause, “of what
avail to you are these shreds of thoughts taken here and there from
the vast extent of a work of which no true idea can be given except
by comparing it to a river of light, to billows of flame? When a man
plunges into it he is carried away as by an awful current. Dante’s poem
seems but a speck to the reader submerged in the almost Biblical
verses with which Swedenborg renders palpable the Celestial Worlds,
as Beethoven built his palaces of harmony with thousands of notes, as
architects have reared cathedrals with millions of stones. We roll in
soundless depths, where our minds will not always sustain us. Ah, surely
a great and powerful intellect is needed to bring us back, safe and
sound, to our own social beliefs.

“Swedenborg,” resumed the pastor, “was particularly attached to the
Baron de Seraphitz, whose name, according to an old Swedish custom, had
taken from time immemorial the Latin termination of ‘us.’ The baron was
an ardent disciple of the Swedish prophet, who had opened the eyes of
his Inner-Man and brought him to a life in conformity with the decrees
from On-High. He sought for an Angelic Spirit among women; Swedenborg
found her for him in a vision. His bride was the daughter of a London
shoemaker, in whom, said Swedenborg, the life of Heaven shone, she
having passed through all anterior trials. After the death, that is, the
transformation of the prophet, the baron came to Jarvis to accomplish
his celestial nuptials with the observances of Prayer. As for me, who
am not a Seer, I have only known the terrestrial works of this couple.
Their lives were those of saints whose virtues are the glory of the
Roman Church. They ameliorated the condition of our people; they
supplied them all with means in return for work,--little, perhaps,
but enough for all their wants. Those who lived with them in constant
intercourse never saw them show a sign of anger or impatience; they were
constantly beneficent and gentle, full of courtesy and loving-kindness;
their marriage was the harmony of two souls indissolubly united. Two
eiders winging the same flight, the sound in the echo, the thought in
the word,--these, perhaps, are true images of their union. Every one
here in Jarvis loved them with an affection which I can compare only
to the love of a plant for the sun. The wife was simple in her manners,
beautiful in form, lovely in face, with a dignity of bearing like that
of august personages. In 1783, being then twenty-six years old, she
conceived a child; her pregnancy was to the pair a solemn joy. They
prepared to bid the earth farewell; for they told me they should be
transformed when their child had passed the state of infancy which
needed their fostering care until the strength to exist alone should be
given to her.

“Their child was born,--the Seraphita we are now concerned with. From
the moment of her conception father and mother lived a still more
solitary life than in the past, lifting themselves up to heaven by
Prayer. They hoped to see Swedenborg, and faith realized their hope.
The day on which Seraphita came into the world Swedenborg appeared in
Jarvis, and filled the room of the new-born child with light. I was told
that he said, ‘The work is accomplished; the Heavens rejoice!’ Sounds of
unknown melodies were heard throughout the house, seeming to come
from the four points of heaven on the wings of the wind. The spirit of
Swedenborg led the father forth to the shores of the fiord and there
quitted him. Certain inhabitants of Jarvis, having approached Monsieur
Seraphitus as he stood on the shore, heard him repeat those blissful
words of Scripture: ‘How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of Him
who is sent of God!’

“I had left the parsonage on my way to baptize the infant and name
it, and perform the other duties required by law, when I met the baron
returning to the house. ‘Your ministrations are superfluous,’ he said;
‘our child is to be without name on this earth. You must not baptize in
the waters of an earthly Church one who has just been immersed in the
fires of Heaven. This child will remain a blossom, it will not grow old;
you will see it pass away. You exist, but our child has life; you have
outward senses, the child has none, its being is always inward.’ These
words were uttered in so strange and supernatural a voice that I was
more affected by them than by the shining of his face, from which light
appeared to exude. His appearance realized the phantasmal ideas which we
form of inspired beings as we read the prophesies of the Bible. But such
effects are not rare among our mountains, where the nitre of perpetual
snows produces extraordinary phenomena in the human organization.

“I asked him the cause of his emotion. ‘Swedenborg came to us; he has
just left me; I have breathed the air of heaven,’ he replied. ‘Under
what form did he appear?’ I said. ‘Under his earthly form; dressed as
he was the last time I saw him in London, at the house of Richard
Shearsmith, Coldbath-fields, in July, 1771. He wore his brown frieze
coat with steel buttons, his waistcoat buttoned to the throat, a white
cravat, and the same magisterial wig rolled and powdered at the sides
and raised high in front, showing his vast and luminous brow, in keeping
with the noble square face, where all is power and tranquillity. I
recognized the large nose with its fiery nostril, the mouth that
ever smiled,--angelic mouth from which these words, the pledge of my
happiness, have just issued, “We shall meet soon.”’

“The conviction that shone on the baron’s face forbade all discussion; I
listened in silence. His voice had a contagious heat which made my bosom
burn within me; his fanaticism stirred my heart as the anger of another
makes our nerves vibrate. I followed him in silence to his house, where
I saw the nameless child lying mysteriously folded to its mother’s
breast. The babe heard my step and turned its head toward me; its
eyes were not those of an ordinary child. To give you an idea of the
impression I received, I must say that already they saw and thought. The
childhood of this predestined being was attended by circumstances quite
extraordinary in our climate. For nine years our winters were milder
and our summers longer than usual. This phenomenon gave rise to several
discussions among scientific men; but none of their explanations seemed
sufficient to academicians, and the baron smiled when I told him of
them. The child was never seen in its nudity as other children are; it
was never touched by man or woman, but lived a sacred thing upon the
mother’s breast, and it never cried. If you question old David he will
confirm these facts about his mistress, for whom he feels an adoration
like that of Louis IX. for the saint whose name he bore.

“At nine years of age the child began to pray; prayer is her life. You
saw her in the church at Christmas, the only day on which she comes
there; she is separated from the other worshippers by a visible space.
If that space does not exist between herself and men she suffers. That
is why she passes nearly all her time alone in the chateau. The events
of her life are unknown; she is seldom seen; her days are spent in the
state of mystical contemplation which was, so Catholic writers tell us,
habitual with the early Christian solitaries, in whom the oral tradition
of Christ’s own words still remained. Her mind, her soul, her body, all
within her is virgin as the snow on those mountains. At ten years of
age she was just what you see her now. When she was nine her father and
mother expired together, without pain or visible malady, after naming
the day and hour at which they would cease to be. Standing at their
feet she looked at them with a calm eye, not showing either sadness, or
grief, or joy, or curiosity. When we approached to remove the two bodies
she said, ‘Carry them away!’ ‘Seraphita,’ I said, for so we called her,
‘are you not affected by the death of your father and your mother
who loved you so much?’ ‘Dead?’ she answered, ‘no, they live in me
forever--That is nothing,’ she pointed without emotion to the bodies
they were bearing away. I then saw her for the third time only since her
birth. In church it is difficult to distinguish her; she stands near
a column which, seen from the pulpit, is in shadow, so that I cannot
observe her features.

“Of all the servants of the household there remained after the death of
the master and mistress only old David, who, in spite of his eighty-two
years, suffices to wait on his mistress. Some of our Jarvis people tell
wonderful tales about her. These have a certain weight in a land so
essentially conducive to mystery as ours; and I am now studying the
treatise on Incantations by Jean Wier and other works relating to
demonology, where pretended supernatural events are recorded, hoping to
find facts analogous to those which are attributed to her.”

“Then you do not believe in her?” said Wilfrid.

“Oh yes, I do,” said the pastor, genially, “I think her a very
capricious girl; a little spoilt by her parents, who turned her head
with the religious ideas I have just revealed to you.”

Minna shook her head in a way that gently expressed contradiction.

“Poor girl!” continued the old man, “her parents bequeathed to her that
fatal exaltation of soul which misleads mystics and renders them all
more or less mad. She subjects herself to fasts which horrify poor
David. The good old man is like a sensitive plant which quivers at the
slightest breeze, and glows under the first sun-ray. His mistress, whose
incomprehensible language has become his, is the breeze and the sun-ray
to him; in his eyes her feet are diamonds and her brow is strewn with
stars; she walks environed with a white and luminous atmosphere; her
voice is accompanied by music; she has the gift of rendering herself
invisible. If you ask to see her, he will tell you she has gone to the
_astral regions_. It is difficult to believe such a story, is it not?
You know all miracles bear more or less resemblance to the story of the
Golden Tooth. We have our golden tooth in Jarvis, that is all. Duncker
the fisherman asserts that he has seen her plunge into the fiord and
come up in the shape of an eider-duck, at other times walking on the
billows of a storm. Fergus, who leads the flocks to the saeters, says
that in rainy weather a circle of clear sky can be seen over the Swedish
castle; and that the heavens are always blue above Seraphita’s head when
she is on the mountain. Many women hear the tones of a mighty organ when
Seraphita enters the church, and ask their neighbors earnestly if they
too do not hear them. But my daughter, for whom during the last two
years Seraphita has shown much affection, has never heard this music,
and has never perceived the heavenly perfumes which, they say, make the
air fragrant about her when she moves. Minna, to be sure, has often on
returning from their walks together expressed to me the delight of a
young girl in the beauties of our spring-time, in the spicy odors of
budding larches and pines and the earliest flowers; but after our long
winters what can be more natural than such pleasure? The companionship
of this so-called spirit has nothing so very extraordinary in it, has
it, my child?”

“The secrets of that spirit are not mine,” said Minna. “Near it I know
all, away from it I know nothing; near that exquisite life I am no
longer myself, far from it I forget all. The time we pass together is
a dream which my memory scarcely retains. I may have heard yet not
remember the music which the women tell of; in that presence, I may have
breathed celestial perfumes, seen the glory of the heavens, and yet be
unable to recollect them here.”

“What astonishes me most,” resumed the pastor, addressing Wilfrid, “is
to notice that you suffer from being near her.”

“Near her!” exclaimed the stranger, “she has never so much as let
me touch her hand. When she saw me for the first time her glance
intimidated me; she said: ‘You are welcome here, for you were to come.’
I fancied that she knew me. I trembled. It is fear that forces me to
believe in her.”

“With me it is love,” said Minna, without a blush.

“Are you making fun of me?” said Monsieur Becker, laughing
good-humoredly; “you my daughter, in calling yourself a Spirit of Love,
and you, Monsieur Wilfrid, in pretending to be a Spirit of Wisdom?”

He drank a glass of beer and so did not see the singular look which
Wilfrid cast upon Minna.

“Jesting apart,” resumed the old gentleman, “I have been much astonished
to hear that these two mad-caps ascended to the summit of the Falberg;
it must be a girlish exaggeration; they probably went to the crest of a
ledge. It is impossible to reach the peaks of the Falberg.”

“If so, father,” said Minna, in an agitated voice, “I must have been
under the power of a spirit; for indeed we reached the summit of the
Ice-Cap.”

“This is really serious,” said Monsieur Becker. “Minna is always
truthful.”

“Monsieur Becker,” said Wilfrid, “I swear to you that Seraphita
exercises such extraordinary power over me that I know no language in
which I can give you the least idea of it. She has revealed to me things
known to myself alone.”

“Somnambulism!” said the old man. “A great many such effects are related
by Jean Wier as phenomena easily explained and formerly observed in
Egypt.”

“Lend me Swedenborg’s theosophical works,” said Wilfrid, “and let me
plunge into those gulfs of light,--you have given me a thirst for them.”

Monsieur Becker took down a volume and gave it to his guest, who
instantly began to read it. It was about nine o’clock in the evening.
The serving-woman brought in the supper. Minna made tea. The repast
over, each turned silently to his or her occupation; the pastor read the
Incantations; Wilfrid pursued the spirit of Swedenborg; and the young
girl continued to sew, her mind absorbed in recollections. It was a true
Norwegian evening--peaceful, studious, and domestic; full of thoughts,
flowers blooming beneath the snow. Wilfrid, as he devoured the pages of
the prophet, lived by his inner senses only; the pastor, looking up at
times from his book, called Minna’s attention to the absorption of
their guest with an air that was half-serious, half-jesting. To Minna’s
thoughts the face of Seraphitus smiled upon her as it hovered above the
clouds of smoke which enveloped them. The clock struck twelve. Suddenly
the outer door was opened violently. Heavy but hurried steps, the steps
of a terrified old man, were heard in the narrow vestibule between the
two doors; then David burst into the parlor.

“Danger, danger!” he cried. “Come! come, all! The evil spirits are
unchained! Fiery mitres are on their heads! Demons, Vertumni, Sirens!
they tempt her as Jesus was tempted on the mountain! Come, come! and
drive them away.”

“Do you not recognize the language of Swedenborg?” said the pastor,
laughing, to Wilfrid. “Here it is; pure from the source.”

But Wilfrid and Minna were gazing in terror at old David, who, with hair
erect, and eyes distraught, his legs trembling and covered with snow,
for he had come without snow-shoes, stood swaying from side to side, as
if some boisterous wind were shaking him.

“Is he harmed?” cried Minna.

“The devils hope and try to conquer her,” replied the old man.

The words made Wilfrid’s pulses throb.

“For the last five hours she has stood erect, her eyes raised to heaven
and her arms extended; she suffers, she cries to God. I cannot cross the
barrier; Hell has posted the Vertumni as sentinels. They have set up an
iron wall between her and her old David. She wants me, but what can I
do? Oh, help me! help me! Come and pray!”

The old man’s despair was terrible to see.

“The Light of God is defending her,” he went on, with infectious faith,
“but oh! she might yield to violence.”

“Silence, David! you are raving. This is a matter to be verified. We
will go with you,” said the pastor, “and you shall see that there are no
Vertumni, nor Satans, nor Sirens, in that house.”

“Your father is blind,” whispered David to Minna.

Wilfrid, on whom the reading of Swedenborg’s first treatise, which he
had rapidly gone through, had produced a powerful effect, was already in
the corridor putting on his skees; Minna was ready in a few moments, and
both left the old men far behind as they darted forward to the Swedish
castle.

“Do you hear that cracking sound?” said Wilfrid.

“The ice of the fiord stirs,” answered Minna; “the spring is coming.”

Wilfrid was silent. When the two reached the courtyard they were
conscious that they had neither the faculty nor the strength to enter
the house.

“What think you of her?” asked Wilfrid.

“See that radiance!” cried Minna, going towards the window of the salon.
“He is there! How beautiful! O my Seraphitus, take me!”

The exclamation was uttered inwardly. She saw Seraphitus standing erect,
lightly swathed in an opal-tinted mist that disappeared at a little
distance from the body, which seemed almost phosphorescent.

“How beautiful she is!” cried Wilfrid, mentally.

Just then Monsieur Becker arrived, followed by David; he saw his
daughter and guest standing before the window; going up to them, he
looked into the salon and said quietly, “Well, my good David, she is
only saying her prayers.”

“Ah, but try to enter, Monsieur.”

“Why disturb those who pray?” answered the pastor.

At this instant the moon, rising above the Falberg, cast its rays upon
the window. All three turned round, attracted by this natural effect
which made them quiver; when they turned back to again look at Seraphita
she had disappeared.

“How strange!” exclaimed Wilfrid.

“I hear delightful sounds,” said Minna.

“Well,” said the pastor, “it is all plain enough; she is going to bed.”

David had entered the house. The others took their way back in silence;
none of them interpreted the vision in the same manner,--Monsieur Becker
doubted, Minna adored, Wilfrid longed.

Wilfrid was a man about thirty-six years of age. His figure, though
broadly developed, was not wanting in symmetry. Like most men who
distinguish themselves above their fellows, he was of medium height; his
chest and shoulders were broad, and his neck short,--a characteristic of
those whose hearts are near their heads; his hair was black, thick, and
fine; his eyes, of a yellow brown, had, as it were, a solar brilliancy,
which proclaimed with what avidity his nature aspired to Light. Though
these strong and virile features were defective through the absence
of an inward peace,--granted only to a life without storms or
conflicts,--they plainly showed the inexhaustible resources of impetuous
senses and the appetites of instinct; just as every motion revealed
the perfection of the man’s physical apparatus, the flexibility of
his senses, and their fidelity when brought into play. This man might
contend with savages, and hear, as they do, the tread of enemies in
distant forests; he could follow a scent in the air, a trail on the
ground, or see on the horizon the signal of a friend. His sleep was
light, like that of all creatures who will not allow themselves to be
surprised. His body came quickly into harmony with the climate of any
country where his tempestuous life conducted him. Art and science would
have admired his organization in the light of a human model. Everything
about him was symmetrical and well-balanced,--action and heart,
intelligence and will. At first sight he might be classed among purely
instinctive beings, who give themselves blindly up to the material wants
of life; but in the very morning of his days he had flung himself into
a higher social world, with which his feelings harmonized; study had
widened his mind, reflection had sharpened his power of thought, and the
sciences had enlarged his understanding. He had studied human laws,--the
working of self-interests brought into conflict by the passions, and he
seemed to have early familiarized himself with the abstractions on which
societies rest. He had pored over books,--those deeds of dead humanity;
he had spent whole nights of pleasure in every European capital; he had
slept on fields of battle the night before the combat and the night that
followed victory. His stormy youth may have flung him on the deck of
some corsair and sent him among the contrasting regions of the globe;
thus it was that he knew the actions of a living humanity. He knew the
present and the past,--a double history; that of to-day, that of other
days. Many men have been, like Wilfrid, equally powerful by the Hand, by
the Heart, by the Head; like him, the majority have abused their triple
power. But though this man still held by certain outward liens to the
slimy side of humanity, he belonged also and positively to the sphere
where force is intelligent. In spite of the many veils which enveloped
his soul, there were certain ineffable symptoms of this fact which were
visible to pure spirits, to the eyes of the child whose innocence has
known no breath of evil passions, to the eyes of the old man who has
lived to regain his purity.

These signs revealed a Cain for whom there was still hope,--one who
seemed as though he were seeking absolution from the ends of the
earth. Minna suspected the galley-slave of glory in the man; Seraphita
recognized him. Both admired and both pitied him. Whence came their
prescience? Nothing could be more simple nor yet more extraordinary.
As soon as we seek to penetrate the secrets of Nature, where nothing
is secret, and where it is only necessary to have the eyes to see, we
perceive that the simple produces the marvellous.

“Seraphitus,” said Minna one evening a few days after Wilfrid’s arrival
in Jarvis, “you read the soul of this stranger while I have only vague
impressions of it. He chills me or else he excites me; but you seem to
know the cause of this cold and of this heat; tell me what it means, for
you know all about him.”

“Yes, I have seen the causes,” said Seraphitus, lowing his large
eyelids.

“By what power?” asked the curious Minna.

“I have the gift of Specialism,” he answered. “Specialism is an inward
sight which can penetrate all things; you will only understand its full
meaning through a comparison. In the great cities of Europe where works
are produced by which the human Hand seeks to represent the effects of
the moral nature was well as those of the physical nature, there are
glorious men who express ideas in marble. The sculptor acts on the
stone; he fashions it; he puts a realm of ideas into it. There
are statues which the hand of man has endowed with the faculty of
representing the noble side of humanity, or the whole evil side; most
men see in such marbles a human figure and nothing more; a few other
men, a little higher in the scale of being, perceive a fraction of the
thoughts expressed in the statue; but the Initiates in the secrets of
art are of the same intellect as the sculptor; they see in his work
the whole universe of his thought. Such persons are in themselves the
principles of art; they bear within them a mirror which reflects nature
in her slightest manifestations. Well! so it is with me; I have within
me a mirror before which the moral nature, with its causes and effects,
appears and is reflected. Entering thus into the consciousness of others
I am able to divine both the future and the past. How? do you still ask
how? Imagine that the marble statue is the body of a man, a piece of
statuary in which we see the emotion, sentiment, passion, vice or crime,
virtue or repentance which the creating hand has put into it, and
you will then comprehend how it is that I read the soul of this
foreigner--though what I have said does not explain the gift of
Specialism; for to conceive the nature of that gift we must possess it.”

Though Wilfrid belonged to the two first divisions of humanity, the men
of force and the men of thought, yet his excesses, his tumultuous life,
and his misdeeds had often turned him towards Faith; for doubt has two
sides; a side to the light and a side to the darkness. Wilfrid had too
closely clasped the world under its forms of Matter and of Mind not to
have acquired that thirst for the unknown, that longing to _go beyond_
which lay their grasp upon the men who know, and wish, and will.
But neither his knowledge, nor his actions, nor his will, had found
direction. He had fled from social life from necessity; as a great
criminal seeks the cloister. Remorse, that virtue of weak beings,
did not touch him. Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again.
Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all. But in traversing the world,
which he made his cloister, Wilfrid had found no balm for his wounds; he
saw nothing in nature to which he could attach himself. In him, despair
had dried the sources of desire. He was one of those beings who, having
gone through all passions and come out victorious, have nothing more to
raise in their hot-beds, and who, lacking opportunity to put themselves
at the head of their fellow-men to trample under iron heel entire
populations, buy, at the price of a horrible martyrdom, the faculty of
ruining themselves in some belief,--rocks sublime, which await the touch
of a wand that comes not to bring the waters gushing from their far-off
spring.

Led by a scheme of his restless, inquiring life to the shores of Norway,
the sudden arrival of winter had detained the wanderer at Jarvis. The
day on which, for the first time, he saw Seraphita, the whole past of
his life faded from his mind. The young girl excited emotions which he
had thought could never be revived. The ashes gave forth a lingering
flame at the first murmurings of that voice. Who has ever felt himself
return to youth and purity after growing cold and numb with age and
soiled with impurity? Suddenly, Wilfrid loved as he had never loved; he
loved secretly, with faith, with fear, with inward madness. His life was
stirred to the very source of his being at the mere thought of seeing
Seraphita. As he listened to her he was transported into unknown worlds;
he was mute before her, she magnetized him. There, beneath the snows,
among the glaciers, bloomed the celestial flower to which his hopes, so
long betrayed, aspired; the sight of which awakened ideas of freshness,
purity, and faith which grouped about his soul and lifted it to higher
regions,--as Angels bear to heaven the Elect in those symbolic pictures
inspired by the guardian spirit of a great master. Celestial perfumes
softened the granite hardness of the rocky scene; light endowed with
speech shed its divine melodies on the path of him who looked to heaven.
After emptying the cup of terrestrial love which his teeth had bitten as
he drank it, he saw before him the chalice of salvation where the limpid
waters sparkled, making thirsty for ineffable delights whoever dare
apply his lips burning with a faith so strong that the crystal shall not
be shattered.

But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been
seeking up and down the earth. He went impetuously to Seraphita, meaning
to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under which he
bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm in his
saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery animal only
made the rider heavier and more solid. He sought her to relate his
life,--to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of his faults,
to show the ruins of his desert. But no sooner had he crossed
her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes of
scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none behind,
than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his prey in
the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a message
of love, and stops his bound. A gulf opened before him, into which his
frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a voice which
changed his being; he became as a child, a child of sixteen, timid and
frightened before this maiden with serene brow, this white figure whose
inalterable calm was like the cruel impassibility of human justice. The
combat between them had never ceased until this evening, when with a
glance she brought him down, as a falcon making his dizzy spirals in
the air around his prey causes it to fall stupefied to earth, before
carrying it to his eyrie.

We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is
one of our own actions,--struggles which are, as it were, the reverse
side of humanity. This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side to
men. More than once Seraphita had proved to Wilfrid that she knew this
hidden and ever varied side, which is to the majority of men a second
being. Often she said to him in her dove-like voice: “Why all this
vehemence?” when on his way to her he had sworn she should be his.
Wilfrid was, however, strong enough to raise the cry of revolt to which
he had given utterance in Monsieur Becker’s study. The narrative of
the old pastor had calmed him. Sceptical and derisive as he was, he saw
belief like a sidereal brilliance dawning on his life. He asked himself
if Seraphita were not an exile from the higher spheres seeking the
homeward way. The fanciful deifications of all ordinary lovers he could
not give to this lily of Norway in whose divinity he believed. Why lived
she here beside this fiord? What did she? Questions that received no
answer filled his mind. Above all, what was about to happen between
them? What fate had brought him there? To him, Seraphita was the
motionless marble, light nevertheless as a vapor, which Minna had seen
that day poised above the precipices of the Falberg. Could she thus
stand on the edge of all gulfs without danger, without a tremor of the
arching eyebrows, or a quiver of the light of the eye? If his love was
to be without hope, it was not without curiosity.

From the moment when Wilfrid suspected the ethereal nature of the
enchantress who had told him the secrets of his life in melodious
utterance, he had longed to try to subject her, to keep her to himself,
to tear her from the heaven where, perhaps, she was awaited. Earth and
Humanity seized their prey; he would imitate them. His pride, the only
sentiment through which man can long be exalted, would make him happy in
this triumph for the rest of his life. The idea sent the blood boiling
through his veins, and his heart swelled. If he did not succeed, he
would destroy her,--it is so natural to destroy that which we cannot
possess, to deny what we cannot comprehend, to insult that which we
envy.

On the morrow, Wilfrid, laden with ideas which the extraordinary events
of the previous night naturally awakened in his mind, resolved to
question David, and went to find him on the pretext of asking after
Seraphita’s health. Though Monsieur Becker spoke of the old servant as
falling into dotage, Wilfrid relied on his own perspicacity to discover
scraps of truth in the torrent of the old man’s rambling talk.

David had the immovable, undecided, physiognomy of an octogenarian.
Under his white hair lay a forehead lined with wrinkles like the stone
courses of a ruined wall; and his face was furrowed like the bed of a
dried-up torrent. His life seemed to have retreated wholly to the eyes,
where light still shone, though its gleams were obscured by a mistiness
which seemed to indicate either an active mental alienation or the
stupid stare of drunkenness. His slow and heavy movements betrayed the
glacial weight of age, and communicated an icy influence to whoever
allowed themselves to look long at him,--for he possessed the magnetic
force of torpor. His limited intelligence was only roused by the sight,
the hearing, or the recollection of his mistress. She was the soul of
this wholly material fragment of an existence. Any one seeing David
alone by himself would have thought him a corpse; let Seraphita enter,
let her voice be heard, or a mention of her be made, and the dead came
forth from his grave and recovered speech and motion. The dry bones
were not more truly awakened by the divine breath in the valley of
Jehoshaphat, and never was that apocalyptic vision better realized than
in this Lazarus issuing from the sepulchre into life at the voice of
a young girl. His language, which was always figurative and often
incomprehensible, prevented the inhabitants of the village from talking
with him; but they respected a mind that deviated so utterly from common
ways,--a thing which the masses instinctively admire.

Wilfrid found him in the antechamber, apparently asleep beside the
stove. Like a dog who recognizes a friend of the family, the old man
raised his eyes, saw the foreigner, and did not stir.

“Where is she?” inquired Wilfrid, sitting down beside him.

David fluttered his fingers in the air as if to express the flight of a
bird.

“Does she still suffer?” asked Wilfrid.

“Beings vowed to Heaven are able so to suffer that suffering does not
lessen their love; this is the mark of the true faith,” answered the old
man, solemnly, like an instrument which, on being touched, gives forth
an accidental note.

“Who taught you those words?”

“The Spirit.”

“What happened to her last night? Did you force your way past the
Vertumni standing sentinel? did you evade the Mammons?”

“Yes”; answered David, as though awaking from a dream.

The misty gleam of his eyes melted into a ray that came direct from
the soul and made it by degrees brilliant as that of an eagle, as
intelligent as that of a poet.

“What did you see?” asked Wilfrid, astonished at this sudden change.

“I saw Species and Shapes; I heard the Spirit of all things; I beheld
the revolt of the Evil Ones; I listened to the words of the Good. Seven
devils came, and seven archangels descended from on high. The archangels
stood apart and looked on through veils. The devils were close by; they
shone, they acted. Mammon came on his pearly shell in the shape of a
beautiful naked woman; her snowy body dazzled the eye, no human form
ever equalled it; and he said, ‘I am Pleasure; thou shalt possess me!’
Lucifer, prince of serpents, was there in sovereign robes; his Manhood
was glorious as the beauty of an angel, and he said, ‘Humanity shall be
at thy feet!’ The Queen of misers,--she who gives back naught that she
has ever received,--the Sea, came wrapped in her virent mantle; she
opened her bosom, she showed her gems, she brought forth her treasures
and offered them; waves of sapphire and of emerald came at her bidding;
her hidden wonders stirred, they rose to the surface of her breast, they
spoke; the rarest pearl of Ocean spread its iridescent wings and gave
voice to its marine melodies, saying, ‘Twin daughter of suffering, we
are sisters! await me; let us go together; all I need is to become a
Woman.’ The Bird with the wings of an eagle and the paws of a lion, the
head of a woman and the body of a horse, the Animal, fell down before
her and licked her feet, and promised seven hundred years of plenty to
her best-beloved daughter. Then came the most formidable of all, the
Child, weeping at her knees, and saying, ‘Wilt thou leave me, feeble
and suffering as I am? oh, my mother, stay!’ and he played with her,
and shed languor on the air, and the Heavens themselves had pity for
his wail. The Virgin of pure song brought forth her choirs to relax the
soul. The Kings of the East came with their slaves, their armies, and
their women; the Wounded asked her for succor, the Sorrowful stretched
forth their hands: ‘Do not leave us! do not leave us!’ they cried. I,
too, I cried, ‘Do not leave us! we adore thee! stay!’ Flowers, bursting
from the seed, bathed her in their fragrance which uttered, ‘Stay!’ The
giant Enakim came forth from Jupiter, leading Gold and its friends and
all the Spirits of the Astral Regions which are joined with him, and
they said, ‘We are thine for seven hundred years.’ At last came Death on
his pale horse, crying, ‘I will obey thee!’ One and all fell prostrate
before her. Could you but have seen them! They covered as it were a vast
plain, and they cried aloud to her, ‘We have nurtured thee, thou art our
child; do not abandon us!’ At length Life issued from her Ruby Waters,
and said, ‘I will not leave thee!’ then, finding Seraphita silent, she
flamed upon her as the sun, crying out, ‘I am light!’ ‘_The light_
is there!’ cried Seraphita, pointing to the clouds where stood the
archangels; but she was wearied out; Desire had wrung her nerves, she
could only cry, ‘My God! my God!’ Ah! many an Angelic Spirit, scaling
the mountain and nigh to the summit, has set his foot upon a rolling
stone which plunged him back into the abyss! All these lost Spirits
adored her constancy; they stood around her,--a choir without a
song,--weeping and whispering, ‘Courage!’ At last she conquered;
Desire--let loose upon her in every Shape and every Species--was
vanquished. She stood in prayer, and when at last her eyes were lifted
she saw the feet of Angels circling in the Heavens.”

“She saw the feet of Angels?” repeated Wilfrid.

“Yes,” said the old man.

“Was it a dream that she told you?” asked Wilfrid.

“A dream as real as your life,” answered David; “I was there.”

The calm assurance of the old servant affected Wilfrid powerfully.
He went away asking himself whether these visions were any less
extraordinary than those he had read of in Swedenborg the night before.

“If Spirits exist, they must act,” he was saying to himself as he
entered the parsonage, where he found Monsieur Becker alone.

“Dear pastor,” he said, “Seraphita is connected with us in form only,
and even that form is inexplicable. Do not think me a madman or a lover;
a profound conviction cannot be argued with. Convert my belief into
scientific theories, and let us try to enlighten each other. To-morrow
evening we shall both be with her.”

“What then?” said Monsieur Becker.

“If her eye ignores space,” replied Wilfrid, “if her thought is an
intelligent sight which enables her to perceive all things in their
essence, and to connect them with the general evolution of the universe,
if, in a word, she sees and knows all, let us seat the Pythoness on her
tripod, let us force this pitiless eagle by threats to spread its wings!
Help me! I breathe a fire which burns my vitals; I must quench it or it
will consume me. I have found a prey at last, and it shall be mine!”

“The conquest will be difficult,” said the pastor, “because this girl
is--”

“Is what?” cried Wilfrid.

“Mad,” said the old man.

“I will not dispute her madness, but neither must you dispute her
wonderful powers. Dear Monsieur Becker, she has often confounded me with
her learning. Has she travelled?”

“From her house to the fiord, no further.”

“Never left this place!” exclaimed Wilfrid. “Then she must have read
immensely.”

“Not a page, not one iota! I am the only person who possesses any books
in Jarvis. The works of Swedenborg--the only books that were in the
chateau--you see before you. She has never looked into a single one of
them.”

“Have you tried to talk with her?”

“What good would that do?”

“Does no one live with her in that house?”

“She has no friends but you and Minna, nor any servant except old
David.”

“It cannot be that she knows nothing of science nor of art.”

“Who should teach her?” said the pastor.

“But if she can discuss such matters pertinently, as she has often done
with me, what do you make of it?”

“The girl may have acquired through years of silence the faculties
enjoyed by Apollonius of Tyana and other pretended sorcerers burned
by the Inquisition, which did not choose to admit the fact of
second-sight.”

“If she can speak Arabic, what would you say to that?”

“The history of medical science gives many authentic instances of girls
who have spoken languages entirely unknown to them.”

“What can I do?” exclaimed Wilfrid. “She knows of secrets in my past
life known only to me.”

“I shall be curious if she can tell me thoughts that I have confided to
no living person,” said Monsieur Becker.

Minna entered the room.

“Well, my daughter, and how is your familiar spirit?”

“He suffers, father,” she answered, bowing to Wilfrid. “Human passions,
clothed in their false riches, surrounded him all night, and showed him
all the glories of the world. But you think these things mere tales.”

“Tales as beautiful to those who read them in their brains as the
‘Arabian Nights’ to common minds,” said the pastor, smiling.

“Did not Satan carry our Savior to the pinnacle of the Temple, and show
him all the kingdoms of the world?” she said.

“The Evangelists,” replied her father, “did not correct their copies
very carefully, and several versions are in existence.”

“You believe in the reality of these visions?” said Wilfrid to Minna.

“Who can doubt when he relates them.”

“He?” demanded Wilfrid. “Who?”

“He who is there,” replied Minna, motioning towards the chateau.

“Are you speaking of Seraphita?” he said.

The young girl bent her head, and looked at him with an expression of
gentle mischief.

“You too!” exclaimed Wilfrid, “you take pleasure in confounding me. Who
and what is she? What do you think of her?”

“What I feel is inexplicable,” said Minna, blushing.

“You are all crazy!” cried the pastor.

“Farewell, until to-morrow evening,” said Wilfrid.




CHAPTER IV. THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY


There are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays
co-operate. Nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of
ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn
the spectators. Transmitted as heirlooms from generation to generation,
these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could be the most
faithful of historians had they speech. They know the joys and sorrows
of the great and those of the small. Everywhere do they go; they are
worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to usurers, borne off
in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in masterpieces conceived
by art for their protection. None, except the pearl of Cleopatra,
has been lost. The Great and the Fortunate assemble to witness the
coronation of some king, whose trappings are the work of men’s hands,
but the purple of whose raiment is less glorious than that of the
flowers of the field. These festivals, splendid in light, bathed in
music which the hand of man creates, aye, all the triumphs of that hand
are subdued by a thought, crushed by a sentiment. The Mind can illumine
in a man and round a man a light more vivid, can open his ear to more
melodious harmonies, can seat him on clouds of shining constellations
and teach him to question them. The Heart can do still greater things.
Man may come into the presence of one sole being and find in a single
word, a single look, an influence so weighty to bear, of so luminous a
light, so penetrating a sound, that he succumbs and kneels before it.
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are
within us. A single secret of science is a realm of wonders to the man
of learning. Do the trumpets of Power, the jewels of Wealth, the music
of Joy, or a vast concourse of people attend his mental festival? No, he
finds his glory in some dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering
man whispers a single word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted
in a mine, reveals to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every
attractive form which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated
in a wayside ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the
Divine, with all their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine
exile; he walked attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who
prayed and those who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the
Sent of God, who knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three
of his disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest
of inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material
Forms, illuminating the Spiritual Faculties, so that they saw him in his
glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.

Monsieur Becker, Wilfrid, and Minna were all under the influence of fear
as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each desired
to question. To them, in their several ways, the Swedish castle had
grown to mean some gigantic representation, some spectacle like those
whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously marshalled by the
poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to men, are real to
those who begin to penetrate the Spiritual World. On the tiers of this
Coliseum Monsieur Becker seated the gray legions of Doubt, the stern
ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked the various
antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared,
in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies
Time,--an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a broken
globe, the human universe.

Wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest
hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering
powers.

Minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought
with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds which met her ear
redoubled her curiosity.

To all three, therefore, this evening was to be what that other evening
had been for the pilgrims to Emmaus, what a vision was to Dante, an
inspiration to Homer,--to them, three aspects of the world revealed,
veils rent away, doubts dissipated, darkness illumined. Humanity in all
its moods expecting light could not be better represented than here by
this young girl, this man in the vigor of his age, and these old men,
of whom one was learned enough to doubt, the other ignorant enough
to believe. Never was any scene more simple in appearance, nor more
portentous in reality.

When they entered the room, ushered in by old David, they found
Seraphita standing by a table on which were served the various dishes
which compose a “tea”; a form of collation which in the North takes the
place of wine and its pleasures,--reserved more exclusively for Southern
climes. Certainly nothing proclaimed in her, or in him, a being with the
strange power of appearing under two distinct forms; nothing about her
betrayed the manifold powers which she wielded. Like a careful housewife
attending to the comfort of her guests, she ordered David to put more
wood into the stove.

“Good evening, my neighbors,” she said. “Dear Monsieur Becker, you do
right to come; you see me living for the last time, perhaps. This winter
has killed me. Will you sit there?” she said to Wilfrid. “And you,
Minna, here?” pointing to a chair beside her. “I see you have brought
your embroidery. Did you invent that stitch? the design is very pretty.
For whom is it,--your father, or monsieur?” she added, turning to
Wilfrid. “Surely we ought to give him, before we part, a remembrance of
the daughters of Norway.”

“Did you suffer much yesterday?” asked Wilfrid.

“It was nothing,” she answered; “the suffering gladdened me; it was
necessary, to enable me to leave this life.”

“Then death does not alarm you?” said Monsieur Becker, smiling, for he
did not think her ill.

“No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying: to some, death is
victory, to others, defeat.”

“Do you think that you have conquered?” asked Minna.

“I do not know,” she said, “perhaps I have only taken a step in the
path.”

The lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled beneath
slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the prying guests
and kept them silent. Monsieur Becker was the first to recover courage.

“Dear child,” he said, “you are truth itself, and you are ever kind.
I would ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your
tea-table. If we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things;
if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of our
doubts?”

“Ah!” she said smiling, “I walk on the clouds. I visit the depths of
the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing
flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine!
I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind
which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth
and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls
dart from their ocean depths and--”

“--who led me safely to the summit of the Falberg?” said Minna,
interrupting her.

“Thou! thou too!” exclaimed the strange being, with a luminous glance
at the young girl which filled her soul with trouble. “Had I not the
faculty of reading through your foreheads the desires which have brought
you here, should I be what you think I am?” she said, encircling all
three with her controlling glance, to David’s great satisfaction. The
old man rubbed his hands with pleasure as he left the room.

“Ah!” she resumed after a pause, “you have come, all of you, with the
curiosity of children. You, my poor Monsieur Becker, have asked yourself
how it was possible that a girl of seventeen should know even a single
one of those secrets which men of science seek with their noses to the
earth,--instead of raising their eyes to heaven. Were I to tell you how
and at what point the plant merges into the animal you would begin
to doubt your doubts. You have plotted to question me; you will admit
that?”

“Yes, dear Seraphita,” answered Wilfrid; “but the desire is a natural
one to men, is it not?”

“You will bore this dear child with such topics,” she said, passing her
hand lightly over Minna’s hair with a caressing gesture.

The young girl raised her eyes and seemed as though she longed to lose
herself in him.

“Speech is the endowment of us all,” resumed the mysterious creature,
gravely. “Woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing
that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here below.
Speech moves the universe. Monsieur Becker, I desire to say nothing
unnecessarily. I know the difficulties that beset your mind; would you
not think it a miracle if I were now to lay bare the past history of
your consciousness? Well, the miracle shall be accomplished. You have
never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts. I alone,
immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; I can terrify you with
yourself.

“You stand on the darkest side of Doubt. You do not believe in
God,--although you know it not,--and all things here below are secondary
to him who rejects the first principle of things. Let us leave aside the
fruitless discussions of false philosophy. The spiritualist generations
made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist
generations have made to deny Spirit. Why such discussions? Does not man
himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? Do we not find in him
material things and spiritual things? None but a madman can refuse to
see in the human body a fragment of Matter; your natural sciences, when
they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those
of other animals. On the other hand, the idea produced in man by the
comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the
domain of Matter. As to this, I offer no opinion. I am now concerned
with your doubts, not with my certainties. To you, as to the majority of
thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved
to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover,
do not seem Material. The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in
man, with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which
he perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so
multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one
has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who
can reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in
relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here,
then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly
obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.

“Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter
and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a
universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other. Have
the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they
a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they
hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us therefore spring over
and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in
the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,--a creation
visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible,
imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void,
yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives
equally from the one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world
these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but
conjoined by fact. However abstract man may suppose the relation which
binds two things together, the line of junction is perceptible. How?
Where? We are not now in search of the vanishing point where Matter
subtilizes. If such were the question, I cannot see why He who has, by
physical relations, studded with stars at immeasurable distances the
heavens which veil Him, may not have created solid substances, nor why
you deny Him the faculty of giving a body to thought.

“Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe
are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from
substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses
upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in
us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and
unnamed things compose--in order to fit the problem of Creation to the
measure of your logic--a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite,
God would still not be its master. Now, reasoning with your views, dear
pastor, no matter in what way God the infinite is concerned with this
block of finite Matter, He cannot exist and retain the attributes with
which man invests Him. Seek Him in facts, and He is not; spiritually and
materially, you have made God impossible. Listen to the Word of human
Reason forced to its ultimate conclusions.

“In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only
two states are possible between them,--either God and Matter are
contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were
Reason--the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its
existence--accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not
invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.
Let human philosophies pile mountain upon mountain of words and of
ideas, let religions accumulate images and beliefs, revelations and
mysteries, you must face at last this terrible dilemma and choose
between the two propositions which compose it; you have no option, and
one as much as the other leads human reason to Doubt.

“The problem thus established, what signifies Spirit or Matter? Why
trouble about the march of the worlds in one direction or in another,
since the Being who guides them is shown to be an absurdity? Why
continue to ask whether man is approaching heaven or receding from it,
whether creation is rising towards Spirit or descending towards Matter,
if the questioned universe gives no reply? What signifies theogonies and
their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since whichever side of the
problem is man’s choice, his God exists not? Let us for a moment take up
the first proposition, and suppose God contemporaneous with Matter.
Is subjection to the action or the co-existence of an alien substance
consistent with being God at all? In such a system, would not God become
a secondary agent compelled to organize Matter? If so, who compelled
Him? Between His material gross companion and Himself, who was the
arbiter? Who paid the wages of the six days’ labor imputed to the great
Designer? Has any determining force been found which was neither God nor
Matter? God being regarded as the manufacturer of the machinery of the
worlds, is it not as ridiculous to call Him God as to call the slave who
turns the grindstone a Roman citizen? Besides, another difficulty, as
insoluble to this supreme human reason as it is to God, presents itself.

“If we carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who
put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not
know on what the feet of their elephant may rest? This supreme will,
issuing from the contest between God and Matter, this God, this more
than God, can He have existed throughout eternity without willing what
He afterwards willed,--admitting that Eternity can be divided into two
eras. No matter where God is, what becomes of His intuitive intelligence
if He did not know His ultimate thought? Which, then, is the true
Eternity,--the created Eternity or the uncreated? But if God throughout
all time did will the world such as it is, this new necessity, which
harmonizes with the idea of sovereign intelligence, implies the
co-eternity of Matter. Whether Matter be co-eternal by a divine will
necessarily accordant with itself from the beginning, or whether
Matter be co-eternal of its own being, the power of God, which must be
absolute, perishes if His will is circumscribed; for in that case God
would find within Him a determining force which would control Him. Can
He be God if He can no more separate Himself from His creation in a past
eternity than in the coming eternity?

“This face of the problem is insoluble in its cause. Let us now inquire
into its effects. If a God compelled to have created the world from all
eternity seems inexplicable, He is quite as unintelligible in perpetual
cohesion with His work. God, constrained to live eternally united to His
creation is held down to His first position as workman. Can you conceive
of a God who shall be neither independent of nor dependent on His work?
Could He destroy that work without challenging Himself? Ask yourself,
and decide! Whether He destroys it some day, or whether He never
destroys it, either way is fatal to the attributes without which God
cannot exist. Is the world an experiment? is it a perishable form to
which destruction must come? If it is, is not God inconsistent and
impotent? inconsistent, because He ought to have seen the result before
the attempt,--moreover why should He delay to destroy that which He is
to destroy?--impotent, for how else could He have created an imperfect
man?

“If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes
to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation perfect? The
idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely intelligent who could
make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of His work,
and its regeneration? Moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily,
indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor
recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it
would never issue. In that case God would be dependent on His work;
it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we fall back into one of the
propositions most antagonistic to God. If the world is imperfect, it
can progress; if perfect, it is stationary. On the other hand, if it
be impossible to admit of a progressive God ignorant through a past
eternity of the results of His creative work, can there be a stationary
God? would not that imply the triumph of Matter? would it not be the
greatest of all negations? Under the first hypothesis God perishes
through weakness; under the second through the Force of his inertia.

“Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the
conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God, is
to deny God. Forced to choose, in order to govern the nations, between
the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have preferred
this solution of it. Hence the doctrine of the two principles of
Magianism, brought from Asia and adopted in Europe under the form of
Satan warring with the Eternal Father. But this religious formula and
the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from it are surely
crimes against the Majesty Divine. What other term can we apply to
the belief which sets up as a rival to God a personification of Evil,
striving eternally against the Omnipotent Mind without the possibility
of ultimate triumph? Your statics declare that two Forces thus pitted
against each other are reciprocally rendered null.

“Do you turn back, therefore, to the other side of the problem, and say
that God pre-existed, original, alone?

“I will not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full
force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions
raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us
look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. If God
pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was
therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is
non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine Spirit. If this
be so, the World is Eternal, and also it must be God. Is not this
proposition even more fatal than the former to the attributes conferred
on God by human reason? How can the actual condition of Matter be
explained if we suppose it to issue from the bosom of God and to be
ever united with Him? Is it possible to believe that the All-Powerful,
supremely good in His essence and in His faculties, has engendered
things dissimilar to Himself. Must He not in all things and through all
things be like unto Himself? Can there be in God certain evil parts
of which at some future day he may rid Himself?--a conjecture less
offensive and absurd than terrible, for the reason that it drags back
into Him the two principles which the preceding theory proved to be
inadmissible. God must be ONE; He cannot be divided without renouncing
the most important condition of His existence. It is therefore
impossible to admit of a fraction of God which yet is not God. This
hypothesis seemed so criminal to the Roman Church that she has made the
omnipresence of God in the least particles of the Eucharist an article
of faith.

“But how then can we imagine an omnipotent mind which does not triumph?
How associate it unless in triumph with Nature? But Nature is not
triumphant; she seeks, combines, remodels, dies, and is born again; she
is even more convulsed when creating than when all was fusion; Nature
suffers, groans, is ignorant, degenerates, does evil; deceives herself,
annihilates herself, disappears, and begins again. If God is associated
with Nature, how can we explain the inoperative indifference of the
divine principle? Wherefore death? How came it that Evil, king of
the earth, was born of a God supremely good in His essence and in His
faculties, who can produce nothing that is not made in His own image?

“But if, from this relentless conclusion which leads at once to
absurdity, we pass to details, what end are we to assign to the world?
If all is God, all is reciprocally cause and effect; all is _One_ as God
is _One_, and we can perceive neither points of likeness nor points of
difference. Can the real end be a rotation of Matter which subtilizes
and disappears? In whatever sense it were done, would not this
mechanical trick of Matter issuing from God and returning to God seem
a sort of child’s play? Why should God make himself gross with Matter?
Under which form is he most God? Which has the ascendant, Matter or
Spirit, when neither can in any way do wrong? Who can comprehend the
Deity engaged in this perpetual business, by which he divides Himself
into two Natures, one of which knows nothing, while the other knows all?
Can you conceive of God amusing Himself in the form of man, laughing at
His own efforts, dying Friday, to be born again Sunday, and continuing
this play from age to age, knowing the end from all eternity, and
telling nothing to Himself, the Creature, of what He the Creator, does?
The God of the preceding hypothesis, a God so nugatory by the very power
of His inertia, seems the more possible of the two if we are compelled
to choose between the impossibilities with which this God, so dull a
jester, fusillades Himself when two sections of humanity argue face to
face, weapons in hand.

“However absurd this outcome of the second problem may seem, it
was adopted by half the human race in the sunny lands where smiling
mythologies were created. Those amorous nations were consistent;
with them all was God, even Fear and its dastardy, even crime and its
bacchanals. If we accept pantheism,--the religion of many a great human
genius,--who shall say where the greater reason lies? Is it with the
savage, free in the desert, clothed in his nudity, listening to the sun,
talking to the sea, sublime and always true in his deeds whatever they
may be; or shall we find it in civilized man, who derives his chief
enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all her resources to put
a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour
of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? When the rake of
pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have
passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will
be found to have the greater reason,--the Nubian savage or the patrician
of Thebes? Your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to
depths, they embrace all, the end as well as the means.

“But if the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world presents
still stronger arguments against God. Where, then, is progress? If all
things are indeed moving toward perfection why do we die young? why do
not nations perpetuate themselves? The world having issued from God and
being contained in God can it be stationary? Do we live once, or do
we live always? If we live once, hurried onward by the march of the
Great-Whole, a knowledge of which has not been given to us, let us act
as we please. If we are eternal, let things take their course. Is the
created being guilty if he exists at the instant of the transitions? If
he sins at the moment of a great transformation will he be punished for
it after being its victim? What becomes of the Divine goodness if we are
not transferred to the regions of the blest--should any such exist?
What becomes of God’s prescience if He is ignorant of the results of the
trials to which He subjects us? What is this alternative offered to man
by all religions,--either to boil in some eternal cauldron or to walk
in white robes, a palm in his hand and a halo round his head? Can it
be that this pagan invention is the final word of God? Where is the
generous soul who does not feel that the calculating virtue which seeks
the eternity of pleasure offered by all religions to whoever fulfils
at stray moments certain fanciful and often unnatural conditions, is
unworthy of man and of God? Is it not a mockery to give to man impetuous
senses and forbid him to satisfy them? Besides, what mean these ascetic
objections if Good and Evil are equally abolished? Does Evil exist?
If substance in all its forms is God, then Evil is God. The faculty of
reasoning as well as the faculty of feeling having been given to man
to use, nothing can be more excusable in him than to seek to know the
meaning of human suffering and the prospects of the future.

“If these rigid and rigorous arguments lead to such conclusions
confusion must reign. The world would have no fixedness; nothing
would advance, nothing would pause, all would change, nothing would be
destroyed, all would reappear after self-renovation; for if your mind
does not clearly demonstrate to you an end, it is equally impossible to
demonstrate the destruction of the smallest particle of Matter; Matter
can transform but not annihilate itself.

“Though blind force may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent
force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet
with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God?
If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble,
ye idolatries and ye religions! Fall, feeble keystones of all social
arches, powerless to retard the decay, the death, the oblivion that
have overtaken all nations however firmly founded! Fall, morality and
justice! our crimes are purely relative; they are divine effects whose
causes we are not allowed to know. All is God. Either we are God or God
is not!--Child of a century whose every year has laid upon your brow,
old man, the ice of its unbelief, here, here is the summing up of your
lifetime of thought, of your science and your reflections! Dear Monsieur
Becker, you have laid your head upon the pillow of Doubt, because it is
the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority
of mankind, who say in their hearts: ‘Let us think no more of these
problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic
demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given us so many
other ways to get from earth to heaven.’

“Tell me, dear pastor, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I evaded
the point of any? nay, rather, have I not clearly stated all? First, in
the dogma of two principles,--an antagonism in which God perishes for
the reason that being All-Powerful He chose to combat. Secondly, in the
absurd pantheism where, all being God, God exists no longer. These two
sources, from which have flowed all the religions for whose triumph
Earth has toiled and prayed, are equally pernicious. Behold in them the
double-bladed axe with which you decapitate the white old man whom you
enthrone among your painted clouds! And now, to me the axe, I wield it!”

Monsieur Becker and Wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something like
terror.

“To believe,” continued Seraphita, in her Woman’s voice, for the Man
had finished speaking, “to believe is a gift. To believe is to feel.
To believe in God we must feel God. This feeling is a possession slowly
acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers which you
admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who know and
those who act, are acquired. Thought, that budget of the relations which
you perceive among created things, is an intellectual language which can
be learned, is it not? Belief, the budget of celestial truths, is also a
language as superior to thought as thought is to instinct. This language
also can be learned. The Believer answers with a single cry, a single
gesture; Faith puts within his hand a flaming sword with which he
pierces and illumines all. The Seer attains to heaven and descends not.
But there are beings who believe and see, who know and will, who love
and pray and wait. Submissive, yet aspiring to the kingdom of light,
they have neither the aloofness of the Believer nor the silence of the
Seer; they listen and reply. To them the doubt of the twilight ages
is not a murderous weapon, but a divining rod; they accept the contest
under every form; they train their tongues to every language; they are
never angered, though they groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not
in them, but rather the softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates
and warms and illumines. To their eyes Doubt is neither an impiety, nor
a blasphemy, nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon
their steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light. This being so,
dear pastor, let us reason together.

“You do not believe in God? Why? God, to your thinking, is
incomprehensible, inexplicable. Agreed. I will not reply that to
comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you
that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the right
to affirm that which to me is believable. There is, for you, one
evident fact, which lies within yourself. In you, Matter has ended in
intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will
end in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? God may seem to you
incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all
things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman. Why should
His craft stop short at man, His most finished creation?

“If that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation.
Happily, although you deny God, you are obliged, in order to establish
your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your
arguments as much as your arguments kill God. We have also admitted that
Matter and Spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each other;
that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to which the
finite material world has given rise; that if no one on earth is able
to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the great-whole of
terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to the knowledge of
the relations which the spirit perceives betwee

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