judgment, and turned away, with something of a sigh, from his dear love and ambition. Now, however, this love came suddenly back, and with tenfold intensity, as is always the case, and, though I dreaded its unhealthiness, I could no longer thwart him. Indeed, the Art-sense took such complete possession of him that I feared to interpose obstacles. He did not go about his work like a boy, but bent himself to it with the calm, resolute purpose of a man of forty. I could see the increasing mastery of the idea, in his changed eye, in his compressed lip, in his statelier, calmer pose; and, however incredulous we may be respecting _results_, these initiatory motions never fail to impress us. Even Bluebeard would forbear to strike down his pregnant wife, for the sake of what she bore under her bosom; and I, seeing the boy's careful study, and his long and laborious preparation, could not help looking forward to a result of commensurate importance. Nevertheless, it was my duty to have combated Clarian's tendencies, for I could not help seeing the daily injury they did him. _Ars longa, vita brevis_, was an overpowering conviction of the lad's, and he went to work to apply the maddest of correctives. Art so exacting and life so short, then it was his office to labor so much the more earnestly, so much the more eagerly, that he might squeeze dry this orange of the present, and lose no opportunity, no moment. Thus it came to pass with him, as it does with us all who overwork ourselves, that actually he did less than he might have done, and warped himself in a most pitiable way indeed. A conscientious fellow, as he was, Clarian had hitherto been very faithful to his duties in the regular curriculum,--but now all this was changed. Here was a grand something to be done, a something so grand, indeed, that his whole life must bow before its exactions, and all minor duties step out of the way of Juggernaut. Who thinks of etiquette, of drawing-room trivialities, when here we are before this mistress, at whose feet we must pour out our soul? for her love blesses us with new life, her scorn damns us with eternal despair. In this cursed fashion always the Idea masters a man's soul, when he has once listened to its Lurlei-song. Henceforth he is only to see things in the light it chooses to shed upon them. Let your Alchemist but seek his Elixir long enough for the poison to fairly fill his veins, and behold what a slave and a monster the Idea shall make of him! Projection awaits him; the elements are here, commingling _in balneo Mariæ_; already _Rosa Solis_ lends its generative warmth; already hath _Leo Rubeus_ wooed and won his lily bride; already hath the tincture headed up royally in ruby and in purple, and sublimed, and gone through the entire circle of embryonic processes: quick! there lacks but the one element; in with it, and we are masters of the Life-Secret, of wealth, and power, and all else the world can bestow,--ay, and we can give back to the world all