Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/205

 and he knows to live and lives to know. "We are approaching an era when human genius shall be the rule, and not the exception, as now. When that day shall dawn, the earth will fully blossom. It has painfully labored heretofore, and brought forth abortions—perfect, seemingly, to their contemporaries, but, in view of her yet untested energies, abortions still." Now, the ink had scarcely dried upon the paper, and yet the dark violet of the aura, emitted by it when in the inkstand, and which rose from the paper wherever the pen touched it, was almost immediately obscured by a far brighter one, which proceeded from the general writing; by which I discovered that This thought was really a part of the man himself. I beheld a small cell within the winged globe open and emit a line of fire, which leaped to one of the cerebral organs, passing up one of the fibrils and down the other—thence to a nerve along it to the arm, the pen, and to the paper, where it became diffused and sealed in the inky letters. And at that moment it came to me, from the far-off regions of positive Knowledge, that, should the paper containing the ideas be burnt, yet the itself could never perish, because it was part and parcel of a Soul; but it would float about in the human world—at some time be absorbed into a human soul, undergo a new gestation, and in due time be born again into the conscious realm around us.

Much more the man wrote; but at length his weary task and the sultry weather overpowered him, and, rising from his seat, he closed the blinds, threw himself upon the lounge, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. While watching the process, I became aware, for the