CAST. I know not if it will make me happier, Evelyn, but I have learned from your lips to believe that many of those legends which I held as poetic fictions, may be the stories of minds, in which, under the influence of devoted affection, the slightest semblance to an object so beloved may work up the phantom of far distant or departed forms. You may have read the romantic devotion of Henry Howard to the fair Geraldine, the flower of England’s court, and the chivalrous challenge of her beauty to the knights of France. During his travels on the continent, he fell in with the alchymist Cornelius Agrippa, who by his sleight cunning showed in a magic mirror (as he said) to the doting mind of the earl, his absent beauty reclining on a couch, and reading by the light of a waxen taper the homage of his pen to her exquisite beauty. Then there was an archbishop of the Euchaites, a professor of magic in the ninth century. The Emperor Basil besought this pseudo-magus Santabaran, for a sight of his long lost and beloved son. He appeared before the emperor in a costume of splendour and mounted on a charger, and sinking into his arms, instantly vanished. This phantasy, and the glamourie of the witch of Falsehope over Michael Scott, and the vision of the wondrous tale of Vatheck, and the legend of the Duke of Anjou in Froissart, might be the rude shadows of some slight phantasmagoria working on a sensitive or impassioned mind; may they not? EV. I am proud of my proselyte, lady. IDA. I presume these illusions may be wrought without the outlines of _distinct shapes_. I have ever thought the vision of Eliphaz the Temanite more solemn, because an _undefined_ shadow: “A vision is before our face, but we cannot discern the form thereof.” And where the _profane_ poets have written thus mystically, they have risen in sublimity. Such is Milton’s portraiture of death: “——the other shape, If shape it could be called, which shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb; Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed neither.” And in the splendid vision of Manfred, whose thoughts were, alas! so polluted by passion— “I see The steady aspect of a clear large star, But nothing more. SPIRIT. We have _no form_ beyond the elements, Of which we are the mind and principle.” And the idolaters profanely adopted this mystic metaphor when they inscribed their Temple of Isis, at Sais— “I am whatever has been, is, and shall be, and no one hath taken off my veil.”