But I think you must be tired of all this, for I fancy that you live much more in the supernatural than the natural world. I always believe in Homer; and in St. Paul's "cloud of witnesses"; and in the old Italian pictures, which have a first story, where the Unseen live _au premier_, with a two-pair back, where the Père Eternel's shadow is half seen peeping out, and a ground floor where poor mortals live, but still have a connexion with the establishment above stairs. I like those books, where the Invisible communicates freely with the Visible Kingdom; not that they ever come up to one's idea, which is always so much brighter than the execution (for the word is only the shadow cast by the light of the thought); but they are suggestive. I always believe in a multitude of spirits inhabiting the same house with ourselves; we are only the entresol, quite the most insignificant of its lodgers, and too busy with our pursuit of daily bread, too much confined with hard work, and too full of the struggle with the material world, to visit the glorious beings immediately about us--whom we shall see, when the present candle of our earthly reason is put out, which blinds us just as the candle end, left burning after one is in bed, long prevents us from seeing the world without, lit up by the full moon. It trembles and flickers and sinks into its socket, and then we catch a bright stripe of moonlight shining on the floor; but it flares up again, and the silvery stream is gone "as if it could not be, as if it had not been," and we can see nothing but the candle, and hardly imagine any other light--till at last it goes quite out, and the flood of moonlight rushes into the room, and every pane of the casement window, and every ivy leaf without, are stamped, as it were, upon the floor, and a whole world revealed to us, which that flickering candle was the means of concealing from us. This is what Jesus Christ meant, I suppose, when He said that He must go away in order to be _with_ His friends in His spirit, that He would be much nearer to them after death than in the flesh. In the flesh, we were separated from our friends by their going into the next room only--a door, a partition divided us; but what can separate two souls? Often I fancy that we can perceive the presence of a good spirit communicating thoughts to us: are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister unto us? When Jesus Christ warns us not to despise any one, because that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of His Father, perhaps He thought that our beloved ones, who are gone, might be these our "angels," who must therefore have communion with men.