Such thoughts were new to me, still more new were those intense longings. The horizon of human power seemed to enlarge around me, and I seemed to rise in the majesty and might of my nature. I was becoming, as it were, a new man. The ethereal fire within had hitherto slumbered. It was now kindled, and its flames aspired to their native heaven. I would no longer be the puny thing I had been. Henceforth I would be a man; a man in the full and lofty sense of the word. Now suddenly my soul seemed to grow, and to become too large for my body, against which it beat as the prisoner beats his head against the walls of his prison-house. I knew not then the source or nature of these feelings, and I cherished them as precious intimations of my affinity with the Origin and Source of all things. At times I was elated; my eye glowed with an unwonted fire, and sparkled with an unearthly brilliancy; my step was elastic, and my whole frame seemed to have received new youth and buoyancy, and to be in some measure withdrawn from the ordinary laws of gravitation. It seemed as if all the great forces of nature flowed into me, and become subject to my will. Nothing was impossible to me. CHAPTER V. SOME PROGRESS. Hitherto I had neither been magnetized myself nor magnetized others. I had read the principal works which had been written in French and English on the subject, and had witnessed and carefully analyzed the experiments made by my friends; but now I madly resolved to make experiments for myself. A portion of the winter of 1841-2 I spent in Philadelphia, and as my acquaintance was principally with the Hicksite Quakers, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Universalists, and open unbelievers in all religion, I was, as a matter of course, thrown into the very circles where Animal Magnetism, as well as all conceivable novelties and absurdities, were the order of the day. My friends and associates were nearly all philanthropists and world-reformers. There were among them seers and seeresses, enthusiasts and fanatics, socialists and communists, abolitionists and anti-hangmen, radicals and women’s-rights men of both sexes; all professing the deepest and most disinterested love for mankind, and claiming to be moved by the single desire to do good to the race. All agreed that hitherto every thing had gone wrong; all agreed in denouncing all forms of religion and government that had hitherto obtained amongst men; all agreed in declaiming against the clergy of all denominations, in manifesting their indignation against all political and civil rule, and whatever tended in the least to restrain the passions of individuals or the multitude, in asserting the wonderful progress of the human race during the last hundred years, and in predicting that a new era was about to dawn for the world; but beyond this I could find scarcely a point on which any two of them were not at loggerheads.