There are times when--we know not why--the spirit of the mind, if I may use a strange term, seems completely to triumph over the mere corporal part of our nature, to conquer its sensations, to make light of its necessities, to overcome its habitual resistance almost without an effort--times when soul seems to possess the whole, when every faculty is subdued to thought. Vain is it to struggle against it--vain to say I will read, I will sport, I will sleep. Thought replies, no; and for the time we are her slave. Such was the case with Gowrie that night; and though he gazed round the chamber as I have said, what it contained made merely an impression upon the eye, which reached not the mind within. It was a large, wide, old-fashioned chamber, the walls of which had no hangings, although two wide pieces of a tapestry, with which the whole room had probably formerly been decorated, were drawn across the windows. On one side of the room was a large bed, almost lost in the extent of the floor, and having curtains of a dingy green hue, and of a silk stuff, the manufacture of which had even then long passed away, formerly called cendal. There was a small round table in the middle of the room, a mirror in a black oak frame standing forth from the wall, supported by two iron bars, a washing-table in the corner, and two or three chairs. That was all that it contained; and, as I have said, it was very large and very gloomy. Nevertheless, although the year was approaching winter, there was something close and oppressive in the atmosphere. It felt as if the windows had not been opened for many a year. Gowrie did not remark it, but sat down at the table and fell into thought again. He remained thus for more than an hour. I have called it thought, but yet it was of that trance-like character wherein all things seem more like impressions than ideas, when dead affections rise up from the tomb of memory in the shape of living existences, and from the future the shadows of unborn events, clad in the forms of actual realities, present themselves for warning or encouragement. There is no continuity, there is no arrangement, there is no operation of the intellect. Mind sits as a spectator while the pageant passes, called up before our eyes by some unnamed power.--What? Who can say? There are things within us and without us that we know not of--that the hardest handed metaphysician has never been able to grasp.