CHAPTER XVIII.
THE UNITIES DISREGARDED.
“Blessed, are they who see, and yet believe not!
Yea, blest are they who look on graves, and still
Believe none dead; who see proud tyrants ruling,
And yet believe not in the strength of Evil.”
Leopold Schefer.
The admirers of Aristotle must bear with us while we take a little liberty: that, namely, of violating all the unities.
Fourteen years had slipped by since the great steamboat accident; fourteen years, pregnant with forces, and prolific of events, to the far-reaching influence of which no limit can be set.
In those years a mechanic named Marshall, while building a saw-mill for Captain Sutter in California, had noticed a glistening substance at the bottom of the sluice. Thence the beginning of the great exodus from the old States, which soon peopled the auriferous region, and in five years made San Francisco one of the world’s great cities.
In those years the phenomena, by some called spiritual, of which our friend Peek had got an inkling, excited the attention of many thousand thinkers both in America and Europe. In France these manifestations attracted the investigation of the Emperor himself, and won many influential believers, among them Delamarre, editor of La Patrie. In England they found advocates among a small but educated class; while the Queen’s consort, the good and great Prince Albert, was too far advanced on the same road to find even novelty in what Swedenborg and Wesley had long before prepared him to regard as among the irregular developments of spirit power.