as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising. * * * * * “He had knowledge about many things and topics,--much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its ‘sum-m-mjects’ and ‘om m-mjects.’ Sad enough, for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things,--for most part in a rather profitless, uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. * * * * * * One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity rubbing elbows with us on this solid earth,--how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles, and dim-melting ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract thinking and dreaming, idealistic one, passed amid the ghosts of defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The mourning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary feeling.”