Julius LeVallon: An Episode

“_Strange as it may appear to the modern mind, whose one ambition is to harden and formalise itself ... the ancient mind conceived of knowledge in a totally different fashion. I...

“_Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; Thy face remembered is from other worlds. It has been died for, though I know not when, I...

Some remnant of ghostly knowledge quickened. Behind the mind and brain, in that region, perhaps, where thought ceases and intuition offers her amazing pageant, there stirred--re...

Meanwhile my intercourse with Nature now began to betray itself in curious little ways, and none more revealing of this mingled joy and nervousness than my growing excitement on...

“_Love and pity are pleading with me this hour. What is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield, Offering beauty, love, and immortal power, Aeons away in some far-off heave...

“_Yet, when I would command thee hence, Thou mockest at the vain pretence, Murmuring in mine ear a song Once loved, alas! forgotten long; And on my brow I feel a kiss That I wou...

“_We cannot limit the types, superhuman or subhuman, that may obtain. We can ‘set no bounds to the existence or powers of sentient beings’--a consideration of the highest import...

“_Instead of conceiving the elements as controlled merely by blindly operative forces, they may be imagined as animated spiritual beings, who strive after certain states, and of...

“_‘Body,’ observes Plotinus, ‘is the true river of Lethe.’ The memory of definite events in former lives can hardly come easily to a consciousness allied with brain.... Bearing...

“_We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates to...

The brilliance of the figure dimmed and melted, as though the shadows ate it from the edges inwards; there came a rattling at the handle of that inner chamber door; it opened su...

“_Can we be wiser by reason of something which we have forgotten? Unquestionably we can.... A man who dies after acquiring knowledge--and all men acquire some--might enter his n...

One evening, as the shadows began to lengthen across the valley, I came in from my walk, and saw Mrs. LeVallon on the veranda, looking out towards the ridges now tipped with the...

A rush of air ran softly round the walls and roof, then dropped away into silence. There was this increased activity outside. A roar next sounded in the chimney, high up rather;...

I half rose in my chair. The first instinct--strong in me still as I write this here in modern Streatham--was to fall upon my knees as in the stress of some immense, remembered...

“_Proof of the reality of a personal sovereign of the universe will not be obtained. But proof of the reality of a power or powers, not unworthy of the title of gods_, in respec...

“_Not yet are fixed the prison bars; The hidden light the spirit owns If blown to flame would dim the stars And they who rule them from their thrones: And the proud sceptred spi...

“_In the case of personal relations, I do not see that heredity would help us at all. Heredity, however, can produce a more satisfactory explanation of innate aptitudes. On the...

By my last half-year at Motfield Close, when I was Head of the school, LeVallon had already left, but the summer term preceding his departure is the one most full of delightful...

For a long time that letter lay on my table like a challenge--neither accepted nor refused. Something that had slumbered in me for twenty years awoke. The enchantment of my yout...

I remember what followed very much as one remembers the confusion after an anæsthetic--fragments of extraordinary dream and of sensational experience jostling one another on the...

“_Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance when we regard it no longer as a single and unexplained break in an unending life, but as part of the continually recurring...

And so, in due course, the period of our schooldays came to its appointed end without one single further reference to the particular thing I dreaded. Julius had offered no furth...

There was an interval of a year and a half before we met again. No letters passed between us, and I had no knowledge of where LeVallon was or what he did. Yet while in one sense...

“_The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within my mind, It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind. To-day was past and dead for me, for...

“_Souls without a past behind them, springing suddenly into existence, out of nothing, with marked mental and moral peculiarities, are a conception as monstrous as would be the...

My mind retains with photographic accuracy the detail of that sinister yet gorgeous night. One thing alone vitiates the value of my report--while I remember what happened, I can...

“_Why is she set so far, so far above me, And yet not altogether raised above? I would give all the world that she should love me, My soul that she should never learn to love._”...

“_There remains love. The gain which the memory of the past gives us here is that the memory of past love for any person can strengthen our present love of him. And this is what...

I made no reply. There are moments when extraordinary emotions, beyond expression either of tears or laughter, move the heart as with the glory of another world. And one of thes...

I stepped down, it seemed, into a lilliputian world where the grander issues no longer drew the souls of men. The deep and simple things were fled, the old Nature gods withdrawn...

“_With virtue the point is perhaps clearer.... I have forgotten the greater number of the good and evil acts which I have done in my present life. And yet each must have left a...

“_He (man) first clothes the gods in the image of his own innermost nature; he personifies them as modes of his own greater consciousness. All this was native to him when he sti...

“_We do not know where sentient powers, in the widest sense of the term, begin or end. And there may be disturbances and moods of Nature wherein the very elemental forces approa...