While these words were resounding in his mind, the Rosicrucian felt himself carried, with inconceivable swiftness, through the atmosphere. Immediately they ceased he became motionless, though he was still enveloped in the shadows of night. All that had recently occurred to him,—all the strange and moving circumstances of which he had been a spectator, then thronged upon his recollection, and stirred his heart with astonishment. His imagination responded to his amazement. He revisited again, in thought, the blooming grove of Capreæ, the pageantries of Cesarea, the green lanes of Buckingham, the luxurious salon of Paris, and the twilight of the garden of Wahring. Italian beauty lived again in his remembrance, but a beauty marred by licentiousness and cruelty. He seemed to behold once more the multitudes of Palestine, the landscapes of England, the dainty splendours of France, and the tranquil homes of Germany. Gradually, however, his reflections became less incoherent, and the meaning of the vision appeared to evolve itself before him, in inductions fraught at once with reproach and consolation. Coupling together the truths enunciated by the Voice of his unseen visitant, and the spectacles revealed to him in succession through its agency, the Alchemist bethought himself whether his original impressions, as to the condition of humanity, might not, in a great measure, have been erroneous. What he had just witnessed assured him, in an unanswerable manner, that overt crimes or overt virtues were merely the good or evil employment of one or other of the five senses; that they were the bright and black spots upon the spiritual nature of man, the faculæ and the maculæ, as it were, on the disc of his conscience. Satisfied, therefore, that the purity or depravity of every mortal was merely the consequence of the different purpose to which their senses had been directed, the Rosicrucian perceived the intimate relationship subsisting between the immaterial being and the physical organs. He perceived especially that those organs were the channels through which that immaterial portion of humanity was brought into communication with a material existence, was compelled to endure its miseries, or was enabled to appreciate its enjoyments. In this he recognised the veracity of that solemn assurance, that happiness is accessible, even on this earth, to all who use their senses with a virtuous discrimination. Nor had this consolatory truth been enforced merely by a barren asseveration. Balsamo had been taught the inestimable value of those senses, and the penalties of such as abused them by their vices. Five incidents, most touching, or most appalling, had reminded him of the exquisite pleasures derivable from created things, through the eyes, through the nostrils, through the ears, through the palate, and through the nerves. He had seen the anguish, moreover, of those who suffered from the deprivation of either sense, or of those who were tortured by the result of their own heinous misapplication. He had seen this in the insanity of Tiberius, in the torments of Agrippa, in the sadness of Milton, in the desolation of Mirabeau, and even in the philosophic sorrows of Beethoven. The emperor, the tetrarch, the poet, the demagogue, and the musician, crowded upon his memory, and appealed to his judgment with the same melancholy distinctness. Still the villainous predilections of the Rosicrucian contended for the mastery, although his intellect recognised the wisdom of the Vision. A fierce strife arose between his passions and his reason.
Suddenly his eyes opened to the splendour of an autumn morning; and as the sunlight poured along the Boulevard de la Madeleine, as it gilded every blade of grass in the paddock, and streamed in golden pencils through the open window of the cottage, it glittered upon his cheek like raindrops.
Cagliostro was weeping.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Béranger has already conveyed this truth through the melody of his delicious verse:—
"Le vois-tu bien, là-bas, là-bas,
Là-bas, là-bas? dit l'Espérance;
Bourgeois, manants, rois et prelats
Lui font de loin la révérence.
C'est le Bonheur, dit l'Espérance.
Courons, courons; doublons le pas,
Pour le trouver là-bas, là-bas,
Là-bas, là-bas."
[6] "I did not dare to breathe aloud the unhallowed anguish of my mind to the majesty of the unsympathising stars."—See Falkland.
[7] "Motus autem siderum," such is the reverent and sententious remark of Grotius, "qui eccentrici, quique epicyclici dicuntur, manifeste ostendunt non vim materiæ, sed liberi agentis ordinationem."—See De Veritate Rel. Christ. Lib. i. § 7.
[8] "Now, there was a word spoken to me in private, and my ears, by stealth as it were, received the veins of its whisper."—Job, chap. iv. verse 12.