But, you say, did not Dante wander there, and Milton? No. Whither they went, they went armed in the uprightness of spiritual strength. They made their hells somber, terrible, _august_; not glamorous or attractive. In Malebolge and Pandemonium alike, there is a certain stability also, a procession of cause and effect; there are horrors, but they are not inconsequential; they take their place in a definite scheme of things. And here is a literary touchstone; both Milton and Dante wielded that supreme quality of style which is called the _Grand Manner_, so that the mere boom and march of their verses arouses the feeling of heroism, of titan strength: a thing it was never given the decadents and drug-fed to do. Dante had his safe guide and teacher with him; as he walked through the wonders and terrors of hell, he himself was the thing most aloof and wonderful. Unscathed he might pass to his meeting with Beatrice, and walk with her in heaven as majestically, as he had walked with Virgil through hell. Milton, too, with all his limitations, remains a thing majestic for our vision; poet or politician, he is still the armed and terrible warrior of God. In his characteristic and later mood, he seeks never beauty, but always righteousness; indeed, his chief fault is that he lost sight of any unity in the two. _Comus_ and _Lycidas_ will show us from what fairyland he had graduated, to take part in the stern earthly labors of his prime. But here is the mark of the later Coleridge, and of all true wanderers in the fairyland of the left. When they see him, "All should cry Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair." Yes--in one of his moods. But what when the inspiration had passed; when the turbulent dark glory that held them had waned from before his eyes; when the Dead Sea Fruit of his fairyland had withered, and left him to be nourished with filth and cinders? Then, too, wholesome men cry _Beware!_--but of a victim of opium, a morphiomaniac, or one sodden with cocaine; a poor wreck of a man, at sight of whom if you close your eyes, it will not be in "holy dread," but in mere sorrow and pity. Poor Coleridge! it was laudanum, and not honey-dew or the milk of Paradise that inspired him. And perhaps we might trace all that part of the literature of wonder which comes from the dark, left-hand fairyland, to drugs; which would remove from the category of genius many a name that figures there now. LIGHT PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL: by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S. A metal is fixed and crystallized light, said H. P. Blavatsky--and was laughed at. Light was not then, nor is it yet, substantive, but a mode of motion--of the ether and of matter. The days when it was substantive and corpuscular, the days of Newton, had gone by. But there are several indications of their return--with additions, the additions warranting H. P. Blavatsky's definition of a metal.