Come there not tones of Love
and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of
beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and
glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad
dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air
summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake
and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel
host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and
Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly,
even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his
Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other
than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its
howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away?
Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the
earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished
from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch
ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider
that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are
in very deed ghosts.
[Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are
made of."]
These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-
blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a
shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some
moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the
Flesh.
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