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314 secrets of one lonely and beating heart. And yet how vain was such knowledge! What could the soothsayer foreshow that we knew not before? The future is written in the past; and if we prophesy, it is with eyes that look behind. Let the prophet tell us to the letter of the days to come—we have lived them already; circumstances may mock us with change of form, but the substance remains the same. We shall go through the same rounds of cares whose anxieties were wasted on what never happened—of vain pleasures whose emptiness we felt even while endeavouring to enjoy them—of sorrows cured by forgetfulness—of envyings, hatreds, regrets, and weariness. What needs there to repeat what we perfectly understood? No: the seer's knowledge, to be of aught avail, must pass the boundary of our little existence—it must pierce the shadows of the grave. Let him open but one secret of that far and dark eternity, and its purchase were well worth all life.

There have been those who on the scaffold have bidden a bold welcome unto Death, as the mighty revealer of the unknown. Such reliance was, methinks, lightly founded. Who knows how many links we may have to ascend in the vast cycle of worlds around, ere we arrive at the one which is knowledge—where we may look before,