As he spoke these words, a burst of pure, brilliant light, like a sudden opening of heaven, broke through the valley; and, as soon as my eyes were able to endure the splendour, such a vision of loveliness and glory opened upon them, as took even my sceptical spirit by surprise, and made it yield, at once, to the potency of the spell. Suspended, as I thought, in air, and occupying the whole of the opposite region of the valley, there appeared an immense orb of light, within which, through a haze of radiance, I could see distinctly groups of young female spirits, who, in silent, but harmonious movement, like that of the stars, wound slowly through a variety of fanciful evolutions; and, as they linked and unlinked each other’s arms, formed a living labyrinth of beauty and grace. Though their feet seemed to tread along a field of light, they had also wings, of the richest hue, which, like rainbows over waterfalls, when played with by the breeze, at every moment reflected a new variety of glory. As I stood, gazing with wonder, the orb, with all its ethereal inmates, gradually receded into the dark void, lessening, as it went, and growing more bright, as it lessened;—till, at length, distant, apparently, as a retiring comet, this little world of Spirits, in one small point of intense radiance, shone its last and vanished. “Go,” exclaimed the rapt Priest, “ye happy souls, of whose dwelling a glimpse is thus given to our eyes, go, wander, in your orb, through the boundless heaven, nor ever let a thought of this perishable world come to mingle its dross with your divine nature, or tempt you to that earthward fall, by which spirits, as bright, have been ruined!” A pause ensued, during which, still under the influence of wonder, I sent my fancy wandering after the inhabitants of that orb,—almost wishing myself credulous enough to believe in a heaven, of which creatures, so like all that I most loved on earth, were inmates. At length, the Priest, with a sigh at the contrast he was about to draw, between the happy spirits we had just seen and the fallen ones of earth, resumed his melancholy History of the Soul. Tracing it, from the first moment of earthward desire, to its final eclipse in the shadows of this world, he dwelt upon every stage of its darkening descent, with a pathos that sent sadness into the very depths of the heart. The first downward look of the Spirit towards earth—the tremble of her wings on the edge of Heaven—the giddy slide, at length, down that fatal descent, and the Lethæan cup, midway in the sky, of which when she has once tasted, Heaven is forgot,—through all these gradations he mournfully traced her fall, to the last stage of darkness, when, wholly immersed in this world, her celestial nature is changed, she can no longer rise above earth, nor remembers her home, but by glimpses so vague, that, mistaking for hope what is only memory, she believes them to be a light from the Future, not the Past.