Poor Flora! half-child of Nature and of Art, was destined to bear a child, and that child the man of these volumes--in the very midst of the conditions here sketched, under these conditions he was born. As already stated, beneath this woman’s heart there slumbered the fires of a volcano, intense, fervent, quenchless, the result alike of her peculiar ancestry and peculiar training. Her full soul became re-incarnate in the son she bore; and with it she endowed the child with her own intense desire to love and be loved; all her mystic spirit, her love of mystery; all her unearthly aspiration toward unearthly association; all her resolute, yet half-desponding, quick, impulsive, passionate, generous nature; all, all, found in him a local habitation and a name, and that name was Genius. Thus moulded came he into the world, doomed from birth to strange and bitter experiences--to face alone and unfriended the bitter blasts of wintry storms, and the burning heats of summer suns; to cling to the hope of speedy death, all the while grasping existence with ten-fold the tenacity of others, yet daily pleading for life--strange contradiction!--dear life, at the world’s stern bar; pleading daily, yet as often losing his suit, and being by that world sentenced to be utterly cast adrift on the fickle tide of Fate and Chance, and that too with a mind and body acutely sensitive, and constantly at war with each other. Compensation is a universal principle. While so alive to pain, he was equally so to the jouissant emotions, and his delights, when they came, were keen, fine, exquisite, to a remarkable degree. As throwing some light on the character of this man--who is not a myth, but an actual existence--I will here repeat the substance of an account himself gave of his early life and weird and ghostly experiences. He had been questioned in regard to certain powers of an unusual kind attributed to him, and the following reply was elicited: “When I was a very young child, my mother dwelt in a large, sombre and gloomy old stone house on Manhattan Island. At that time New York was about one quarter as large as at present, and that house was a long way out of town. It still stands in the same place, but the city has grown miles beyond it. The building, in times of pestilence, fever, smallpox, and cholera, had been used as a pest-house, or lazaretto, and in it thousands have died of those diseases, and from there, in my fifth year, the soul of my mother took its everlasting flight.