"Dreams, Lavendale, idle dreams, visions, will-o'-the-wisps that have lured wiser men than you to the edge of the grave--only to leave him face to face with grim death, and he, poor fool! after a long life wasted over alembics, burned out over the fires of his crucible--ay, with the elixir vitæ within his grasp--falls as easy a prey to the King of Terrors at last as the most ignorant tiller of the fields." "If they are dreams, they have seemed realities to the wisest men this earth ever saw--Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus. If they were believers--" "_Were_ they believers? Across the lapse of centuries how can we tell how much of this was verity and how much falsehood--where the searcher after truth left off and the impostor began? Pshaw, Jack! we live in too prosaic an age to be fooled by those old-world delusions. Is there a man or woman in this park who would not think Lord Lavendale qualified for Bedlam, if it were known that he travelled with an old Venetian necromancer in his train, and that he had a serious expectation of discovering first the transmutation of metals, and then the elixir of life?" "That were a noble discovery for all the race of man; for it is an anomaly in Nature that a man's life should be so brief as it is--that his intellect should take at least thirty years to ripen, and that he should be thought to die full of years if he lives on till eighty--to say nothing of those accidents and contingencies which cut him off in his prime. No, there is error somewhere, friend. Man is too grand a creature for so limited a career. He dies ever with his mission unfulfilled, his task uncompleted. There must be, somewhere amid the mysteries of Nature, the secret of prolonged existence. Paracelsus looked for it and failed; but the world is two hundred years older since his time, and Vincenti is as deep a student as Paracelsus. But it is not that sublime secret for which I pine. My life is too worthless for me to care much about extending it; but there are occult powers for which my soul longs with a passionate longing--extended powers of will and mind, Herrick. The power to enter regions where this body of mine cannot reach--to steal as an invisible spirit into the presence of her I love, breathe in her ear, thrill her every nerve, impel her with my sovereign will to think and feel and move as I will her, draw her to me as the magnet draws iron. She passed me just now with royal disdain; but if I had that mystic power she could not despise me--she must obey, she must love--my spirit would dominate hers as the moon rules the tides."