Professor William James—who certainly holds no brief for the mystic—makes the interesting suggestion that “these mystical flights are inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative to which we as yet know nothing.” {153a} “As a rule,” he says elsewhere, “mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.” The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with the writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson’s mysticism is more speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a greater share in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite apart from, perhaps even transcending, their literary interest is the psychological significance of stories like _Markheim_ and _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones, {153b} has said, when speaking of his “ecstasies”: “His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the visions of Kubla Khan; he saw ‘no damsel with a dulcimer,’ but thrilled with yearning unspeakable for the ‘fuller soul,’ and felt in every trembling fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality.” This attempt to exalt Jefferies at the expense of De Quincey and Coleridge seems to me unfortunate. Enough has been said already in the remarks on De Quincey to show that the dreams of De Quincey were no mere opium dreams. De Quincey was a born dreamer, and from his earliest days had visions and ecstatic moods. The opium which he took (primarily at any rate to relieve pain, not, as Dr. Jones suggests, to excite sensuous imagery) undoubtedly intensified the dream faculty, but it did not produce it. I confess that I do not know quite what the Doctor means by preferring the “purer delight” of the Jefferies exaltation to the vision that produced _Kubla Khan_. If he implies that opium provoked the one and that “the pure breath of Nature” (to use his own phrase) inspired the other, and that the latter consequently is the purer delight, then I cannot follow his reasoning. A vision is not the less “pure” because it has been occasioned by a drug. One of the sublimest spiritual experiences that ever happened to a man came to John Addington Symonds after a dose of chloroform. Nitrous oxide, ether, Indian hemp, opium, these things have been the means of arousing the most wonderful states of ecstatic feeling.