Is it not in some measure the same with the intellectual ideas of man ?"( 1) To this question I answered with an indignant "No!" A "Yes" would have shaken my creed of materialism to the dust.

I wrote on rapidly, warmly.
I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws, which I would not admit that a Deity himself could alter.

I clamped and soldered dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page, to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation of his material senses; mind, or what is called soul, born from and nurtured by them alone; through them to act, and to perish with the machine they moved.

Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian might have taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the feelings which my analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so stubbornly have opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the spiritual! Strange, that at the very time when the thought that I might lose from this life the being I had known scarce a month had just before so appalled me, I should thus complacently sit down to prove that, according to the laws of the nature which my passion obeyed, I must lose for eternity the blessing I now hoped I had won to my life! But how distinctly dissimilar is man in his conduct from man in his systems! See the poet reclined under forest boughs, conning odes to his mistress; follow him out into the world; no mistress ever lived for him there!( 2) See the hard man of science, so austere in his passionless problems; follow him now where the brain rests from its toil, where the heart finds its Sabbath--what child is so tender, so yielding, and soft?
But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet and sage are dust, and no more, when the pulse ceases to beat.

And on that consolatory conclusion my pen stopped.
Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh,--a compassionate, mournful sigh.