The souls of the dead scratch no messages on greasy slates for stupid eyes, shout none across the Styx that can be heard by vulgar ears; but there be men who can hear in the silent watches of the night the music of lips long mute. There be those for whom the veil that separates the two eternities is no black inpenetrable pall, but an Arachne's web, a sacred shadow through which comes sweeping, not the roar of myriad voiced hosannahs and the rustle of countless wings of dazzling white beating the everlasting blue; but the soft incense of love, bringing healing to broken hearts, calm to rebellious souls. These seek no thaumaturgic incantations to secure messages from the other shore, for they are coming continually. They do but listen, and interpret as best they may to their dull-eared brethren, the celestial wisdom. The latter protest that they "inspired," and the trumpet Fame casts upon them her purple robe. It is not the peripatetic "mediums," but the poets and prophets who "call up the spirits" and bid them speak to us; those who find all the dead Past living in the Present; who are themselves so spirituelle that they can understand Nature's finer tones--who realize that "Life is but a dome of many-colored glass That stains the white radiance of eternity." All truly great men are spiritualists--even mystics. A materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way; but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an intellectual Antaeus--the moment his feet leave the sodden clay he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly whose sweet waters make men mad. Parnassus is but an Egyptian pyramid to be scaled with ladders, and by the aid of guides who serve for salary. Fancy has no wings to waft him among the stars. He sees in the Bible only its errors, never its wild beauty. For him Villon was only a sot and Anacreon a libertine. In his cosmos there's neither Garden of the God, nor Groves of Daphne. He can understand neither the platonic love of Petrarch nor the psychological ferocity of Rousseau. "The Apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from Woe wrung overwhelming eloquence." For him all, all is clay--even the laughter of childhood is a cunning mechanism, and the Uranian Venus but a lump of animated earth. The flowers bring him messages only from the muck in which their roots are buried, the "concord of sweet sounds" is but a disturbance of the atmosphere. Such men do not live; they merely exist. They do not enjoy life; they do not even suffer its pangs. They know naught of that sweetness "for which Love is indebted to Sorrow." God pity them. * * *