The search for the philosopher's stone appears in various novels of the period. _St. Leon_, by William Godwin, relates the story of a man who knew how to produce unlimited gold by a secret formula given him by a mysterious stranger who dies in his home. Shelley[25] brings in this power incidentally with the gift of endless life. There is an awe-inspiring use of ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown's novel, _Wieland_, while _Arthur Mervyn_ gives a study in somnambulism. _Zofloya_ suggests hypnotism or mesmerism by saying that Victoria's thought summoned the Moor to her,--that they could have brought him had he been "at the further extremity of this terrestrial globe." This seems a faint foreshadowing of Ibsen's idea in The _Master Builder_. These may illustrate the use of science in Gothicism. [25] In _St. Irvyne_. The elixir of life is brewed in divers Gothic novels. Dramatic and intense as are the psychological experiences connected with the discovery of the magic potion, the effects of the success are more poignant still. The thought that endless mortality, life that may not be laid down, becomes a burden intolerable has appeared in fiction since Swift's account of the Struldbrugs, and perhaps before. Godwin's _St. Leon_ is a story of the secret of perpetual life. The tiresome Godwinistic hero is visited by a decrepit old man who wishes to tell him on a pledge of incommunicability what will give him the power of endless life and boundless wealth. The impoverished nobleman accepts with consequences less enjoyable than he has anticipated. Shelley's hectic romance,[26] whose idea, as Shelley admitted to Stockdale, came from Godwin's book, uses the same theme. The young student with burning eyes, who has discovered the elixir of life, may be compared with Mary Shelley's later picture of Frankenstein. Events are rather confused here, as the villain falls dead in the presence of the devil but comes to life again as another character later in the story,--Shelley informing us of their identity but not troubling to explain it. [26] _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian._ The most impressive instance of the theme of fleshly immortality in the early novels is found in _Melmoth_. Here the mysterious wanderer possesses the power of endless life, but not the right to lay it down when existence becomes a burden. Melmoth can win the boon of death only if he can find another mortal willing to change destinies with him at the price of his soul. He traverses the world in his search and offers the exchange to persons in direst need and suffering the extreme torments, offering to give them wealth as well as life eternal. Yet no man nor woman will buy life at the price of the soul.