"Be welcome!" said he with a pleasing voice: "your Spanish friend has told me much good of you, so that I have long lookt forward with pleasure to becoming acquainted with you. Only you must by no means fancy that you are come to one of the sages, to an adept, or forsooth to a man before whom hell trembles in its foundations: you will find me a mere mortal, such as you yourself are and may become, as may every man whom such graver studies, and retirement from the vain tumult of the world, do not scare away." Antonio felt comfortable and at ease, greatly as he was astonisht: he cast his eyes round the room, which beside a few books and a lute displayed nothing out of the way. In his own mind he compared this little house and its straightforward inmate with the palace and the pomp, the instruments and the mysteries, of his former teacher, and said: "In truth one sees no traces here of that high and hidden knowledge which my friend has been extolling to me, and in which you are said to be infallible." Castalio laught heartily, and then replied: "No, my young friend, not infallible; no mortal can go so far as that. Only look around you; this is my sitting-room; there in that little chamber stands my bed: I have neither space nor means for hiding any instruments of fraud, or setting any artificial machinery in action. All those circles and glasses, those celestial globes and maps of the stars, which your conjurers need for their tricks, would find no room here: and those poor creatures after all are only deluded by the spirit of falsehood, because they will not labour to learn the powers of their own minds. He however who descends into the depths of his own soul, with humility and a pious disposition to guide him, he who is in earnest in wishing to know himself, will at the same time find every thing here which he would vainly strive by desperate means and devices to extort from Heaven and Hell. _Become like children._ In this exhortation the whole mystery lies hidden. Only let our feelings be pure, and we may again, even though it be but for hours or moments, cast off all that our first parents drew down upon themselves by their wanton disobedience; we walk again as in paradise; and Nature with all her powers comes forward as she did then, in the youthful bridal age of the world, to meet the transfigured man. Is not this the very thing which proves our spirit to be a spirit, that bodily hinderances, space and time, with the confusion they breed, cannot confine it? It soars even now on the wings of yearning and devotion far above all the circles of the stars: nothing checks its flight, save that earthly power which, when sin entered, pounced upon it and enslaved it. This however we can and ought to subdue, by prayer, by self-abasement before the Lord, by confessing our vast guilt, and by boundless gratitude to him for his unfathomable love; and then we see and hear the things that are