The hand of destiny seemed to be guiding her to some awful fate, of which presentiment made her fully conscious; but the path to which was strewn with so many charms she willingly, ay anxiously, trod it, and would not have turned back if she could.
DANIEL KELFORD had fitted him up a little study room, in which he spent most of his time. Books were his idols, and he worshiped them with more than a pagan zeal. His table was strewn with antique and curious volumes, many of them abounding in the wild and marvelous, and in these his whole soul seemed absorbed. The love-sick and sentimental had no charm for him; but he sought rather the abstruse and mysterious, bending all his energies to the comprehension of the one and the unraveling of the other. Vague dreams, as it were, flitted through his mind, highly colored by his diseased fancy, and all wearing a supernatural hue. Metaphysics was his darling study. He maintained that, as every particle of matter is dependent on those surrounding it, and as all are bound and held together by attraction, making one whole, and as it is impossible to conceive of one single particle existing independently and unconnected with any other, so every idea is linked with others forming one mind, and a single isolated idea is as impossible as a single and independent particle of matter; and that as various as are the shapes of objects constituted by the combination of particles, so various are the minds formed by the combination of ideas. And as idea linked with idea rose in his mind, he followed on, weaving a chain as incomprehensible to most minds as the inextricable windings of the Cretan labyrinth, until, at length lost in the mazy whirl of his own thoughts, the eye of fancy grew dim and reason tottered on her throne.
Reader, let me conduct you to that little study-room. We will look in at the window near which Daniel sits. It is night, a calm moonlit night of May, and the mingled notes of various night birds and innumerable insects, together with the chastened scenery of the surrounding mountains, as rock, and stream, and cliff, and waterfall appear in the softened beams, are enough to draw the most devoted of ordinary students from their books to contemplate the mighty book of nature, printed in the type of God, its sublime capitals rendering it legible to every observer. But for Daniel Kelford these things now possess no interest. They are unseen and unthought of; for every power of his soul is centered upon the contents of a small roll of manuscript which lies before him. He bends over it, takes up sheet after sheet, his interest increasing as he reads, until he has but one thought, one desire; and that is to understand and to reduce to practice the strange things there taught. Beside him dimly burns his untrimmed lamp, for he does not think to bestow any attention upon it. He has found embodied in words thoughts and ideas that have long floated like shapeless visions through his soul, but which he never could grasp, confine, and reduce to language.