rambled round from a discussion on the respective merits of the Sharp's and the Kentucky rifles (consequent on a trial of skill and rifles which we had had after dinner) to Spiritualism,—led to this last topic by my relation of some singular experiences I had met in the way of presentiments and what seemed almost like second-sight, during a three-months' sojourn in the woods several summers before. There is something wonderfully exciting to the imagination in the wilderness, after the first impression of monotony and lonesomeness has passed away and there comes the necessity to animate this so vacant world with something. And so the pines lift themselves grimly against the twilight sky, and the moanings of the woods become full of meaning and mystery. Living, therefore, summer after summer, as I had done, in the wilderness, until there is no place in the world which seems so much like a home to me as a bark camp in the Adirondack, I had come to be what most people would call morbid, but what I felt to be only sensitive to the things around, which we never see, but to which we all at times pay the deference of a tremor of inexplicable fear, a quicker and less deeply drawn breath, an involuntary turning of the head to see something which we know we shall not see, yet are glad to find that we do not,—all which things we laugh at as childish when they have passed, yet tremble at as readily when they come again. J., who was both poet and philosopher, singularly clear and cold in his analyses, and at the same time of so great imaginative power that he could set his creations at work and then look on and reason out the law of their working as though they were not his, had wonders to tell which always passed mine by a degree; his experiences were more various and marvellous than mine, yet he had a reason for everything, to which I was compelled to defer without being convinced. "Yes," said he, finally knocking out the ashes from his meerschaum, as we rose, at the Doctor's suggestion, to take a row out on the lake while the sun was setting,—"Yes, I believe in your kind of a 'spiritual world,'—but that it is purely subjective."
I was silenced in a moment;—this single sentence, spoken like the expression of the experience of a lifetime, produced an effect which all his logic could not. He had rubbed some talismanic opal, pronouncing the spirit-compelling sentence engraved thereon, and a new world of doubts and mysteries, marvels and revelations burst on me. One phase of existence, which had been hitherto a reality to me, melted away into the thinness of an uncompleted dream; but as it melted away, there appeared behind it a whole universe, of which I had never before dreamed. I had puzzled my brains over the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and found only words; now I grasped and comprehended the round of the thing. I looked through the full range of human cognitions, and found, from beginning to end, a proclamation of the presence of that arch-magician, Imagination. I had said to myself,—"The universe is subjective to Deity, objective to me; but if I am his image, what is that part of me which corresponds to the Creator in Him?" Here I found myself, at last, the creator of a universe of unsubstantialities, all of the stuff that dreams are made of, and all alike unconsciously evoked, whether they were the dreams of sleep or the hauntings of waking hours. I grew bewildered as the thought loomed up in its eternal significance, and a thousand facts and phenomena, which had been standing in the darkness around my little circle of vision, burst into light and recognition, as though they had been waiting beyond the outer verge for the magic words. J. had spoken them.
Silent, almost for the moment unconscious of external things, in the intense exaltation of thought and feeling, I walked down to the shore. Taking the lightest and fleetest of our boats, we pushed off on the perfectly tranquil water. There was no flaw in the mirror which gave us a duplicated world.
