Higher than all souls that seem to theology to have found a final state, above good and evil, neither accused, nor yet accusing, live those, who have come to freedom, their senses sharpened by eternity, piping or dancing or "like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew." Merlin, who in the verses of Chrétien de Troyes was laid in the one tomb with dead lovers, is very near and the saints are far away. Believing too that crucifixion and resurrection were the soul's diary and no mere historical events, which had been transacted in vain should a man come again from the womb and forget his salvation, he could cleave to the heroic doctrine the angel in the crystal made Sir Thomas Kelly renounce and have a "vague memory" of having been "with Christ and Socrates"; and stirred as deeply by hill and tree as by human beauty, he saw all Merlin's people, spirits "of vegetable nature" and fairies whom we "call accident and chance." He made possible a religious life to those who had seen the painters and poets of the romantic movement succeed to theology, but the shepherd and the midwife had they known him would have celebrated him in stories, and turned away from his thought, understanding that he was upon an errand to their masters. Like Swedenborg he believed that heaven came from "an improvement of sensual enjoyment," for sight and hearing, taste and touch grow with the angelic years, but unlike him he could convey to others "enlarged and numerous senses," and the mass of men know instinctively they are safer with an abstract and an index. V