Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely, water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking, therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores which Abernethy so highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_; and can the Gullet in their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the _consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said, the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c., &c.