Nella Fontaine Binckley: "Odds and Ends from an Artist's Life," Chapter III, Part 1

Union Block, 1870, Mt. Pleasant, Iowa (Wiki Commons)

[Nella Fontaine Binckley, "Odds and Ends from an Artist's Life," Chapter III, part 1. From a transcription annotated by Patricia D'Arcy Binckley of typewritten original, February 25, 2005. Original "written some time after 1941 by Nellie F. Binckley, 1860-1950 or 51." Notes in brackets are mine, unless followed by the initials "P.D.B." Occasionally, additional paragraph breaks inserted for easier reading. 

Many thanks to William Myers, Mary Davy, Sally Young and Sue Davis for their ongoing research collaboration; specifically to William for providing a scan of the original document, and in turn many thanks to Peter Binckley and Patricia D'Arcy "Trish" Binckley (1951-2007), at the source.]

When I was eight years old, we went to Norfolk. Lovely seagirt Norfolk, with its magnolia-lined streets! In the Spring the great white blossoms filled the air with their intoxicating fragrance. They are very sensitive flowers, and will not brook a touch. When friends send magnolias to one another, there is but one way to assure their arriving unspoiled. The big glossy dark green leaves with their brown undersides are gathered completely around the blossom, completely covering it, and tied with a ribbon. It doesn't mind its own leaves, but a touch from anything else makes a brown mark on the creamy whiteness of its petals.

We lived on Freemason Street, not very far from the sea wall at the end of the street. We children used to get down from the sea wall to the beach below and play there. We loved it. I don't seem to [remember] much about our life there. One thing I've always remembered. A neighbor, Miss Krutsch, [used] to play an exquisite thing on her piano. She was a musician. I was too young to think to ask her its name. Years after, I heard it played, and found it was a Mazurka by Chopin. 

The other thing that I remember was something that happened when we moved into a different house. Grandmother was with us at that time. She had had a first floor room before, but in the new house she was on the second floor at the back. She never cared for cats[,] and in the afternoon of the day we moved in, when the maid had got the beds made up in the bedrooms, Grandmother went to her room and to her disgust, saw a cat curled up in the middle of her bed. Forgetting that she was now upstairs, she caught up the cat and pitched it out of the open window. Then she remembered and was overwhelmed with horror and remorse. She crawled downstairs to giv orders for the mangled remains to be removed. Sitting placidly at the back door was the cat, putting her fur in order, all her nine lives evidently unimpaired.

Then later, [about 1872 -- M.J.B.] we went to the Northwest to live in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. It was all very different there. In the South, everyone had servants, but in Iowa there were none. All the ladies did their own work. I remember Mother saying how wonderful those Northwestern women were. There was a co-educational University there [Iowa Wesleyan University] and boys and girls came in from the country to study. The girls did all the cleaning, cooking, mending, washing and ironing for themselves and their brothers, and kept up with their studies besides. Some were so poor that brothers and sisters had to live in the same room, with a curtain across. The professor of Mathematics at the University was a young woman, but her chief claim to distinction in the town seemed to be the fact that she got her family wash out on the line on Mondays earlier than anybody else.

Mia and I had been very sorry to part, but we promised to write to each other. The Suverkrops went abroad a year or two after, and never came back to the United States. But Mia and I kept up our correspondence for many years, till she died in England in November, 1939. In her last letter she said, "Well, we're at war." Much as I grieved for the loss of a lifelong friend, I was thankful she was spared the horrors that followed. She had a house in London and a charming cottage in Herefordshire, on the river Wye. She sent me photographs of it. The cottage had been brought fro Norway. She died there. She had written me that the authorities would not allow her to return to her London house, on account of the war.

In the Northwest, Mother found it very difficult to get a ham she liked -- they were all so big and fat and porky. In Virginia, life is incomplete without a ham in the house. It's a standby. No Virginian housewife is every without one. But the hams there are always small and lean and thoroughly cured, often in the family's own smokehouse. It was awfully cold and snowy in Iowa, so later we went to Chicago.

But it was just as cold there. We didn't like Chicago. A pall of smoke hung over the city practically all the time. And a more than occasional hideous whiff from the Stockyards, when the wind happened to serve.

So Father rented a furnished house in the suburbs owned by the artist cousin who had made the sketch of The Cottage long before, and who lived in Chicago. His studio was the first one I had ever seen and I was fascinated. 

In our suburb, the streets were laid out with wooden sidewalks, but it was sparsely built up as yet -- only about one house to a block. It was right on the prairie, so the wind had a free sweep. (The wind was always blowing.)  And the mercury habitually sank down to the bottom of the thermometer. 

I remember Father and my two brothers went rabbit hunting one day when it was 32 degrees below zero. One evening I was sent out to mail some letters in the letter box at the corner. I put on a heavy cape with a hood, but did not bother to put on my mittens. The wiond blew my cape open and I put out my hand and pulled it back around me. When I got home I found blisters on my fingers as if I had touched a hot stove.  

[Ellen/Nellie/Nella Fontaine Binckley (September 1, 1860-April 27, 1951). Family names and dates were whimsically tweaked by their owners during their lifetime, adding mystery and sometimes causing confusion. For Binckley's "Artist's Life," I'm opting for the full artist's signature name, Nella Fontaine Binckley. 

Grandmother = Jane Johnston Mitchell/Michel (1811-1892).
Mother = Mary Louisa/Louise Mitchell/Michel Binckley (1838-1930).
Father = John Milton Binckley (circa 1831-1878).
Two brothers = Harvey Mitchell Binckley (1864-1928) and George Sydney Binckley (1870-1941). 

Euphemia/Mia Alberta Suverkrop (circa 1859-1939). Astonishingly, see "The Suverkrop Letters, 1842-1887," link here.

See also The London Gazette, page 629 (January 30, 1940): EUPHEMIA ALBERTA SUVERKROP, Deceased. Pursuant to the Trustee Act, 1925. ALL persons having claims against the estate of Euphemia Alberta Suverkrop late of "Braeside" Whitchurch [Symonds Yat, Ross] in the county of Hereford, and of 89, Sunderland Road, Forest Hill in the county of London, Spinster, who died on the 22nd day of October 1939 and whose Will was proved in the Principal Probate Registry on the 15th day of January 1940 by National Provincial Bank Limited, the executors named therein, are required to send written particulars of their claims to us, the undersigned, on or before the 31st day of March 1940, after which date the executors will distribute the assets of the deceased among the persons entitled thereto, having regard only to the claims of which the executors shall then have had notice —Dated this 26th day of January, 1940. STURTON and STURTON, 74, Great Tower Street, London, E.G. 3, Solicitors for the (004) Executors. Link here.]

John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast" (1872), Part 3

[John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast." Lakeside Monthly (Chicago), Volume VIII, July to December, 1872, pages 446-455. Some additional paragraph breaks added to the originals for easier reading].

Rapt by these bewildering realities, I stood till fatigue recalled my physical sufferings, and I bent to the ground. I felt that in some inscrutable way I had been brought to the wrong world where I was crushed by its appalling sublimity. Love for all things was lost in my master's fascination, and despair of his favor seized my shuddering soul. I implored him for life, thoughtless of my Maker in presence of a fellow creature so nobly my superior. He smiled with sympathy, and I opened my countenance into his with a trust perfectly implicit. He produced several small objects, and handing them to me I put one into my mouth. It enclosed, in the manner of a medicinal capsule, a fluid resembling the white of eggs, but of a sweetish taste. I eagerly swallowed several, and shortly afterwards fell asleep.

I awoke alone. The glorious quintuple luminary was all in purple shining shadow, sinking to the horizon. High in toward the zenith had come another globe that looked like the sweet moon of Earth. A train of fond recollections hurried over me like flocks of homeward birds. O, the feeling that the dear earth was forever lost! In my passionate grief I cried out "Where am I? What means this transformation of everything real, except my desolate identity alone, in this infinite and awful creation?" Hate arose with my terror. Who tore me from my home, and the love of my own lowly species, to torture me in this lonely and tremendous world?

I longed for the lordly being at whose feet I had crouched in worship so abject and so delicious, with desperate and frantic malice. He suddenly appeared, and I heaped myself on the ground in utter nothingness.

The patient ingenuity of my master, by influencing modifications of my constitution, and by contriving artificial agencies, was long in adapting me sufficiently to the conditions of life on his planet, to qualify me for receiving the instruction which was the object of my persistent curiosity. I learned with astonishment that the period during which the great sun was above the horizon was a season of artificial darkening and refrigeration to the inhabitants. Nobody could behold daylight so hot and bright. I was confounded by further facts.

That globe was a planet of virtual homogeneity, without flora or fauna, water, atmosphere, or vapor. All had disappeared aeons of time ago, and nothing, as it were, remained, but these exalted beings and their works. The atmosphere they breathed, the fluids they drank, the aliments they fed on, the trees, flowers, and, in a word, the landscape, were all artificial — the creation of creatures. It was terrible to reflect that the very breath of life should depend upon the laboratory, and that a whole race, even of superhuman rank, must perish in an hour, were their own art to fail them against the merciless energy of nature. There seemed something unspeakably dreadful in having nothing to trust in creation but Providence and one's own handiwork.

"Nay," said my benign master, "it is dreadful to trust anything else." 

My vesture was of gossamer fineness, and possessed of the peculiar property previously remarked of another, by which a palpable but invisible elasticity interposed to prevent actual contact with my skin, and to fill, as it were, the places, such as the ears, into which the covering could not penetrate, with a pressure like that of the atmosphere of my native planet. The modesty which suggested the addition of a mantle of almost intangible but luminous fineness, meekly blushed on my own human cheek, and the veil had been bestowed with a look of benignant humor. I found that the rhythmical character of motion, sound, and speech, was real and universal. 

My master smiled at my distinction between the actual and the poetical, as he spoke only in rhythmical measures of exquisite cadence; for all things are kindred and in harmony, and the humble singer of earth but faintly glimpses a law of the beautiful as universal as truth.

"Child of an unspent storm," said my reverend master, (transposing his words as I must,) "what you call phenomena, are equally wonderful anywhere, though not equally familiar." 

"Master," said I, "it is art, not phenomena, which most astonishes me. Here I behold a majestic population, existing in happiness, triumphant over all the assurances of certain death. Has Art triumphed over Nature ?" 

"Lowly aspirant, in whose troubled simplicity my fathers shuddered unnumbered ages ago, Art is Nature triumphing. Genius is Nature knowing herself." I begged for knowledge of the wonderful organ on his head.

"The rudiment of it is in your own, where parts of the brain perplex your anatomists. Even after birth, the fontanelles reluctantly close against a development not fitted with adequate conditions in your planet as yet. But it has a little influence on you. You long after a fact of perception not possible to any of your senses; not after an unthinkable Absolute, as you suppose. That perception is mine. One effect of that development of the eminent sense is the capacity for satisfactory ignorance. Beings with our senses cannot speculate. Whatever is knowledge to us, is already known; either actually or potentially. Results suspend themselves in our minds as in your own, under an hypothesis; but, its value at any stage of generalization is exactly demonstrable." 

I begged some illustration. He bade me look at the sky. I described the heavenly bodies in view. 

"The flimsy, inglorious efflux received by the visual sense, from some of the surfaces of bodies, which you call light, alone bespeaks to you the qualities you impute to yonder bodies. Yet it is not ordinarily present to my consciousness, flush with testimonies of reality, immeasurably more noble. You individualized only as you saw. But if I can more than see, my individual and yours may be different. You have adverted to gravity which holds bodies in space; might not that gravity be the individual object, and the globe you see, the incident only ?" 

"But the one is material, and the other immaterial," I ventured.

"But both make themselves known to sense: what you call the material, to your sense, and both of them to my sense. If, now, both affect my sense alike, both, being real, are alike material or immaterial." 

Was then vacancy itself sensible to the organs of higher beings? He divined my thought. 

"Lowly inquirer," said my master, "there is no vacancy. There is no super-reality, and there is no sub-reality; but there is Reality, and that is everywhere. A force impinging on you, is all you profess to know of reality. That is all I know; for even sense, as your own philosophers teach, must be just that, and nothing more. But if you had no eye, what would you suppose of the force which trembles across the limitless fields of heaven to the optic nerve, there to impinge, and reveal light? You would not believe there was such a force, and without knowledge of that, how few others could you ever have known?"

"Does the eminent sense enable you to perceive worlds too remote for telescopic vision?" l faltered to ask my awful master after the dear, distant globe, where Moses published the Law, where Homer sang, and where Humboldt reasoned — where my mother bore me, and where infancy hailed me father. 

My gentle master turned to a particular direction, and intently regarded the sky; the godly coronal flashing with the tension, until at length he spoke:

"Sad is the spectacle of your own planet — a nascent world, horrid with the raw violence of furious forces; quaking with internal fires; frozen with snows; inundated with seas; deformed with volcanic crags; darkened with fogs; and peopled with the repulsive creatures of infra-human grade, able even yet to dispute with man his prerogative in the progress." 

"But your world is in its giddy youth. As ages roll on, she will draw nearer to her sun; her mountains will wash into her seas; her vapors will solidify; her atmosphere will grow thinner; her animal and vegetal life will die out; and during all this, man will supply, by his expanding genius, the requisites for his subsistence and exaltation ; his coronal sense will emerge from his brain; his head will tower with the glory of its developed organ, and he will at length be as I am." 

"But long before he reaches my grade, he will shrink, with wonder and disgust, to look back at the selfishness of his ancestry — for he will have learned that fear was the sole origin of vice and folly, and ignorance the cause of fear; that as fast as he got knowledge, he got freedom; and with freedom, courage; and with courage, confidence; and with confidence, love. He will have learned that even Man is good, every whit he dares be."

[THE END].

John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast" (1872), Part 2

[John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast." Lakeside Monthly (Chicago), Volume VIII, July to December, 1872, pages 446-455. Some additional paragraph breaks added to the originals for easier reading].

The compatibility of a pride felt as superhuman, with a self-renunciation perfectly abject, became a new revelation; while shame and fear, anxious and unmitigated, alone arose from thought of myself. The impulse to approach him was irrepressible. I rejoiced in being strong enough to creep. I could not lift my eyes, but hugged his ankles with tearful fervency. 

A single reflection crossed my mind: "This is not God; yet what is man, that even this being should regard him?" I abhorred my identity, that seemed to stand between my desire and its object. Divided between dread and joy, I felt a thrill of unprecedented tenderness in every fibre, heard a sound as of speech, but charged with a transmuting pathos, and then — peace. 

Without conscious volition, I now stood erect before the benign countenance of a master of my species. No terrible brightness now repelled me from the mysterious crest, in whose panel - like openings a sweet vicissitude of aspects pleased me, while making the discovery that I was beholding a part of his natural body, the organ of a superhuman sense. I must attempt a description.

The upper rim of the arch, which was perhaps nine or ten lines above the head of man, was studded with short, lustrous, firm, slightly spiral tufts, the intervals filled with similar but shorter hair, all issuing perpendicularly to the arch, the roots veiled in continual brightness, the tufts and all diminishing on either side, from the centre, until lost, with the arch, in the mazy curls of the temples. From under this growth and the rim of the arch, pearly membranes, yet of fitful opaline tints, like distant lightnings flashing from within an evening cloud, descended to attachments hidden by the hair over the forehead.

These membranes were five in number: one in the centre, marking the face of the organ with a peculiar median line; one which shut in and sank with each extremity ; and one, on either side, between. Then there was a single transverse membrane, of similar character, shaped like a thin crescent moon, which was hung prone under the arch from end to end, over the others. Between these crosswise membranes, and formed by their state of tension, lay the mysterious openings. Their number was four, a large and a small one on each side. Their form approached an upright parallelogram, the corners more or less obtuse, according to the state of membranous contraction, with corresponding increase or diminution of size, even to complete closure.

l had frequently experienced the disgust with which the imagination recoils from its own best attempts at improving the human form by any structural addition. But the accession of beauty and dignity from the real endowment before my eyes, extinguished on the spot, in my mind forever, the fitness of a body like mine to express superior personality.

As I stood facing this sovereign of my soul and body, I was ignorant of all volition; or, if the idea remained, it was as if my will pursued rather than incited action. I engaged mechanically in sundry exercises, not prompted by any visible sign from him, who seemed to be studying me with the curiosity of a naturalist contemplating a zoological discovery. I found that an itching at my nostrils was due to the attachment to them of flexible tubes of extreme tenuity, that passed over my shoulders. My emaciation had diminished, though I was still sensible of great debility; but, besides other ills and disagreeable novelties of sensation, I was burdened with an irksome and unaccountable mechanism about my person.

A throbbing turgescence of my tongue, mouth, and lips, and, in some degree, also, in my ears, under my nails, and wherever the investing dress could not closely bind my skin, was a painful annoyance. The close fit of my goggles pinched the edges of my orbits. My respiring tubes were so fixed that I inspired through one and expired through the other, or through my mouth. But I had to tightly close the latter, in order to make an inspiration. The congested condition of my mouth prevented the possibility of that speech which I was involuntarily but violently attempting.

My master watched me closely. The awful gleam again fell on me from that organ which renders the eye, at this day, an inglorious symbol of the All-Seeing. Presently the throbbing ceased, and only a be numbed, wooden feeling, if I may call it so, remained in my organs of articulation, of which the motory action seemed perfect ; for, though l could hardly hear my own voice in that thin air, I felt myself inspired, and poured forth a stream of words. Thoughts more colossal than I could remember ever to have entertained, marched from the depths of my intellect, forth in easy utterance, in language which I conceived to be of extraordinary grace and power. I pronounced slowly, and witnessed my master silently imitating my articulation.

Presently he recited, in very inaccurate but far sweeter English than I had ever heard before, long passages of my speech. Alternate repetitions between us, rapidly brought us to tolerable agreement. During this lesson, I observed that my super human pupil, by a process of selection profoundly surprising to me, though not in kind different from transcendent instances of human sagacity, reversed the natural order of an alien pupil. He first acquired my names of Deity, of His attributes, of time, space, matter, spirit, life, death, personal identity, and the like. Finally, he astonished me by stating, in intelligible and most musical English, my own ideas, including many I had not uttered, with much of my empirical knowledge, and some of my personal history in my native world. 

I was now for the first lime permitted to behold the scenery about me. 

I looked around. The landscape might admit of partial description, but not, I am afraid, without impracticable prolixity. Clouds, slowly involving each other, lay on a plane with my feet. Earth and heaven seemed mixed. Had a sunset sky, without change of look, fallen upon the ground, or did I, in middle age, stand in the clouds, realizing the simplest and earliest of the fancies of gazing childhood?

But the texture of this mist reserved it from any of the classes which have received names through analysis of terrestrial vapors; though the chemical laboratory sometimes affords glimpses of that peculiar fluorescent yet beautifully translucent vapor, in which formless diffuseness is vaguely reconciled with a sort of crystalline effect. Here and there a kind of nucleus would give more body, shot with shadows of soft, trembling purple. On every hand, vegetable forms of diversity, equally magnificent and novel, showed through the swaying, changeful mist; a semi-transparency confounding some of them, in places, with their own shadows — others being as opaque and green as befits the flora of nature.

Colors were innumerable in contrast, but mostly indescribable by mere recourse to the primaries of the rainbow. Green mingled freely in the varied and sportive confusion of foliage, but, though lustrous, was seldom very positive. The ground was covered by what I took to be a carpet, of a pile endued with strange properties of hue and motion; but I discovered it was planted in the soil. No object was heavy or massive. Groups of trees arranged themselves here and there with the freedom of chance, yet with the striking effects of art. They were of varied altitude and style; some rising on smooth stems to a vast height. Vines sweeping in and out of the luminous dimness, as they were gently moved, showed extraordinary subtlety; some adorned with flowers, displaying, as they swung toward other objects, or under casual incidence of light, the chameleon property, in colors of infinite variety, both of hue and depth.

Far and near, no inelegant object appeared, while the exquisitely low, soft hum which penetrated to my covered ears, was spiritual in the utmost fullness of the metaphor. Fitly that music expressed the perfect immaculateness of all I saw, bringing me the painful conceit that I was myself some sole unseemly substance amidst universal purity.

The place was populous. Moving about, standing in groups, reclining on the ground, or otherwise occupied, I saw fading in the distance, multitudes of beings like my master. None were near. But in the diversity of action and position, the spectacle resembled a city scene on earth, save that there were no houses. From their heads in the distance shot now and then a delicate gleam, as a firefly's spark cleaves the twilight, but in a manner mysteriously imposing. The unknown potency awed me as I gazed. Music, unheard and unimagined before, in soft, leaping tones, broke the low, constant roar, inexpressibly hallowing to my poor human spirit.

All was motion. Tall trees slowly waved, festoons of flowery vines shifted from side to side, boughs nodded, and in the delightful miscellany of detail, everything gently palpitated through the dreamy haze. But I felt no breeze. Presently I found myself involuntarily posturing, and surrendered to the pleasing persuasion that my motions, which I performed in an elaborate, regular order, corresponded with those of visible objects, in a rhythmical series to which I shortly perceived a correspondence of the sounds also. Was this scene all delusion ? I plucked a pale flower, ruptured its stem, and picked its petals to shreds. It did not seem to evolve sap, yet something in its contact stained my vesture. l stamped the firm ground with my own foot. I was not deceived. It was enchantment made real as I stood in my flesh. I looked above.

Over all, silent, motionless, without cloud, galaxy, or nebula, the great heavens stood. The stars were not those that Abraham saw when God bade him count in the Chaldean heavens the fruition of his promise. The sky was blue. That color was the first untempered one I had seen in this marvelous world, and was positive. Yet I must be taken to be accurate in declaring that no blackness I had ever before conceived of was so dark. The great sun, of whose colossal disk I had previously acquired some notion, was not visible, but constellations of unimaginable glory strewed the darkness, without a trace of those which have blessed the meek awe of man from the beginning of the world. 

The deep of the universe seemed visibly infinite, for the sense of vastness I there acquired has ever since made heaven appear the dome it is called. Five celestial bodies in one constellation, apparently the same I had previously beheld, though standing now in different relative positions, besides two others, revealed their immense globes. But this quintuple group, a spectacle of stupendous grandeur, I must attempt to describe.

The smallest of the five seemed less than our moon, the great central one being so vast that I reckoned its apparent diameter at full five degrees, and that of its wonderful aureola at two degrees or more in addition. The next, perhaps half its size, lay upon it in occultation — infancy and maturity, the earliest and greatest of allegories, worshipped even yet in the world. Behind the central globe again another was half disclosed, while the fourth stood apart. Across the whole an eclipse was creeping, the shadow already covering one third of the central body and half of the one which lay upon her bosom.

The illuminated part of the great orb was white as our moon, but with a metallic burnish which quite supplanted her as the silvery orb. It was the shaded part, however, that seized me with a spell. Within it, the great white moon, elsewhere without spot, disclosed that fortuitous mixture of all shapes which constructive imagination delights in, with a disorder so complete as to make a chaos of form infinitely perfect as such, wherein, with a startling though transitory fidelity, I saw my every thought figured. 

If aught could augment this splendor, it was color. Within the shadow, the hue was purple, bright, clear, yet low in tone at the penumbra on the great white face, high where it contrasted with the dark spectral gray of the near orb, of which the illuminated part again was dark, compared with the glittering silver of the great orb.

These effects were, without being obscured, further complicated by the most magnificent and astonishing of all these splendors — the wonderful aureola. It was serrated, as if concentric circles had been crossed by radii of something obeying some law of unequal but regular emission, by which groups of them shot into space beyond the average distance; and some law of refraction by which their radiance flashed into sight only on a line at right angles to the line of vision. So the mediaeval [medieval] astrologers, borrowing from a forgotten lore the imagery only of some lost theory of physics, figured the sun.

[To be continued]. 

John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast" (1872), Part I

[John Milton Binckley: "A Frolic in Space. A Darwinian Forecast." Lakeside Monthly (Chicago), Volume VIII, July to December, 1872, pages 446-455. Some additional paragraph breaks added to the originals for easier reading].

SOME years since, Dr. H., Professor of Chemistry and Toxicology in one of the foremost institutions of Edinburgh, a position to which his extraordinary talents had advanced him while yet quite young, surprised the outer world by suddenly retiring into solitude and obscurity at the very time when an illustrious career seemed opening before him. Various causes were surmised for this strange arrest of a brilliant progress, but the world remained ignorant of the facts; while the unhappy Professor's learned associates, to whom the case had no mystery, guarded the melancholy truth with the affectionate solicitude of hope for their gifted friend's revival. But they were disappointed. He died in a few years, leaving papers showing an experience which must have been one of the most thrilling and marvelous ever recorded.

In the following pages, we give some remarkable passages from this strange record, comprising conceptions of striking and wonderful originality. Prof. H's chemical researches had been most zealous and successful in the line of the narcotics and stimulants, and in common with Turner, Johnston, and others, his efforts compassed the detection of the chemical constitution of the ultimate substances or essences at the very verge of the mind.

Physiologists know that it is our own organs that mysteriously distill the subtle liquor that can alter the current of thought, etc., the office performed by the opium or the alcohol being only to incite the process in our bodies. To isolate and decompose this occult substance was Prof. H's known object. He had accepted the startling conclusion that a control over the conditions and quantity of this substance in the brain would give a control over the character, affections, opinions, religious faith, etc., of the subject; because all the operations of the mind normally derive their complexion from it. It is the pivot of the personality.

That control, he thought, the individual might attain, if, by being acquainted with the chemistry of the substance, he could influence its quality and quantity. Under the guidance of these fearful speculations, he became absorbed in experiments of the most complex and delicate character, upon the living organism; besides subjecting in turn every known narcotic agent to exhaustive analysis. At length he became satisfied that he was on the confines of the great discovery — an opinion which, it is said, many of the ablest savants shared; having ascertained how, as it were, to interpose an agent of his will between the mind and its physical basis.

But the awful consequences of his success were wholly unlooked for; viz.: The relation being broken between the mind and its physical basis — in part only, it is true — the unfortunate discoverer could no longer distinguish between ideas and facts. The rational faculty was entirely unaffected; but between premises superinduced and those normally arising from external impression, there remained no power of discrimination. In this deplorable condition, Prof. H recorded his experiences; nothing having been strong enough to detach him from an illusory creation which he made and kept up by his own will alone.

With this brief explanation, we proceed with the Professor's own record:

I was awakened by agony of some kind; then relapsed into a vague sense of numbness, with intervals of total unconsciousness. These diminished, until there came a continuous but variable aching, so obscure, however, that I was able only to realize a doubt whether or not I was dreaming. Next, though still very imperfectly, came a notion of something fearful, like a dissolving or disintegrating that the will might resist, and I have a comparatively clear recollection of my effort to do it. My sensations were strangely mixed and indefinite. A dull coldness began to pronounce itself, followed by a faint din in my ears and colored rings and spots in my sight. But all my notions were more or less blended and obscure.

Soon the relations of things began to revive; and with a clearer self-consciousness I distinctly felt cold and other suffering. Something horrible oppressed me, which I perceive it is nonsense to call by the fittest phrase I can frame — a fluctuant idea of death.

Gradually dim light came, while my distress somewhat diminished, and with it a constant and not unmusical roar. Cramps began to assail me, with a sensation of nervous twitches in various parts of my body. I got warmer, however, and taking up the opinion that I was suffering an attack of nightmare, reflected with relief that such were considered harmless.

My breathing was labored, and soon alarming palpitations, alternating with apparently total cessations of the heart's motion, renewed my terror. Meantime my sight improved, and naturally the first object that engaged it was my own suffering body. I found myself in the recumbent position, back and head slightly raised, and perfectly naked. Increasing light shocked me at the extreme emaciation of my usually robust frame, to which respiration communicated a ghastly, galvanized motion. Nevertheless, my skin appeared to have the exquisite roseate hue and tender texture of a babe's.

Looking about in my wonder, l saw no object in the dimness but several open tubes rising on either side near to me, while, instead of the walls and furniture of my bed-chamber, and the "Immaculate Conception" from Murillo, which should have hung to my right hand, nothing was in sight but a wide, silky looking, grayish sheet, through which the tubes protruded. On this I lay, slightly shaking it as I breathed. I looked above; but the spectacle there was so astonishing that I was convinced it was a dream, and that the matin kiss of my little daughter — my accustomed call to the day — would soon awaken me to love and joy. But this was transitory.

The growing light testified, and my eyes revolted, against my reason. I saw above me an unheard of sky. It was real. A constellation, consisting of one great orb with a strangely notched halo, and four smaller ones near it, glittered in silver splendor from the darkness. Two immense but less brilliant crescents adorned other quarters of the sky.

My eyes shrank from the now greatly increasing light. At length, opening them an instant and looking, as I lay, backward over my brows, they shut against an overwhelming radiance. The impression on my closed eyes was painful, its inconstancy not correctly indicating size, but the tremendous enormity of the segment painted on the retina constrained me to imagine a sun whose whole apparent diameter in the heavens would occupy seven or eight degrees!

Light and heat intensified, and I became more acutely miserable. Racking cramps, involuntary twitchings, fitful pulsation, hiccoughs, etc., tormented me. Perspiration came to my relief. After what seemed a long, confused dream, I opened my eyes with comparative impunity. I tried my voice, and was surprised to find by its reverberations, and by familiar optical effects, that I was not in the open air, but in what seemed a large transparent sphere; I attempted to touch the hammock or sheet on which I lay, and found it had the extraordinary property of repelling contact, as if some palpable but invisible elastic medium interposed between its surface and my finger. I felt a welcome languor subduing me, and the last thing l recollect is a slight sense of hunger.

When I awoke, it was to but a partial consciousness. I felt myself comfortably covered, and assuming all I have described to have been the troubled dream of a night now past, I sank into delicious listlessness. That pleasing confusion of reflection with imagery which constitutes the familiar but mysterious phenomenon of reverie (as far as my own experience responds to the word ) was happily upon me, with all its exquisite interchange of attributes of things without consciousness of inconsistency, and its subtle, note less music. 'This indulgence had been a forbidden bliss for years. Now, l abandoned myself once more to the sweet beatitude of my musing youth. But the melody was getting insensible and therefore incomparably grosser sweetness. It grew louder. I opened my eyes, and was astounded.

Before me stood a being who, I instantly saw, did not belong to the earth. He was not my fellow man, for the ideal highest in my imagination fell short of such manhood as this. He was sublime; formed, nevertheless, as he seemed, to human type, though visibly glorified by a distinct emanation in the nature of light. His reality was too obvious to admit the most transient suspicion of optical error, or that he was not as material as I was. His garb, of which I observed mostly the general effect of simplicity and grandeur, was composed out of picturesque arrangements of drapery in different thicknesses of a translucent, lustrous stuff, artfully and unequally distributed so as to produce a changeful variety of hues by a constantly changing accumulation in spots of the transmitted light. 

These colors were so tempered that I could have given no name to any of them, though they contrasted in all their variety with the boldness of those of the spectrum. As a whole, the dress was unlike in design all the typical costumes of nations or the ideal drapery of classic art. The neck, and half way thence to either shoulder, the throat, and breast down to the edge over the pit of the stomach, were bare, the exposed part of the bosom being triangular, with the acute point down, where a blazing gem, curiously wrought, violet in color, but with an aureate burnish, seemed contrived as a fastening for the whole. His right arm and leg were less draped than their fellows, and all his limbs were neatly covered, including hands and feet, with a sheeny, pellucid, adhering fabric, of faint, changeable color, supplemented in the soles and palms with some more opaque and firm but compressible lining. 

A very abundant beard, in shining, irregular ringlets, fine and soft as the curls of infancy, rolled down a breast of warm, living white, fairer, I was going to say, than Eve shrinking from the zephyr that made her first breath. After this, I cannot describe the hair — flowing in profuse but studied freedom about the neck of this godlike being, exposing his temples by insensible gradations, and hovering vague on his shoulder like a morning cloud on a white peak.

His stature seemed exalted above man; yet taking size from symmetry and from apparent dimensions of features and limbs, he was hardly as tall as I, and not of half my weight. His frame in general and in detail, even to the half concealed nails of hands and feet, was slighter and more refined than that of any earthly woman; yet the figure plainly indicated within, the firm, articulated skeleton, and was strikingly masculine; revealing in every motion the muscular energy of instinct manhood, tense yet elastic, graceful and powerful. But these particulars must be forborne for something yet more wonderful.

The head of this marvelous being towered higher than that of man, and more abundantly emitted something like a slight phosphorescence, which surrounded his whole body, brightening almost to a flash when he moved. Upon his head, between the vertex and brow, was situated a glorious and almost indescribable object. It was like a coronal, chaplet, or crest, of in conceivable majesty and splendor. I have observed, in the art of mankind, as it may be studied in the archaeological affluence of modern antiquaries, a significant uniformity in the tendency to introduce upon that part of the human head something in the nature of a crest or chaplet of gems, or of stellar or foliate design, whenever, and only when, from the nature of his subject, the effort of the artist was to endow his production with a superhuman dignity. 

In the actual head before me, the crest, if I may so call it, emerged from the hair of the temples, advancing and rising, bolder and broader, until, in the middle, it stood high above and back of the forehead. In its facade, square-like openings seemed windows of glory. I could not then closely scrutinize this amazing object, dazzled by a flickering, flashing radiance, at tended with a mysterious awe in my very soul's seat. 

No inorganic substances I am acquainted with could possibly manifest, by pyrotechnic skill or otherwise, such properties — such trembling, softening, palpitating, beautiful, and terrible light. I dared a bolder inspection: a gleam smote me down like a blast from Deity. 

In blindness and terror, I tried to ask myself whether I was not under some resplendent but fearful hallucination. But I could not think. Among a few distorted, swift, and tumultuous ideas and emotions, as I lay, one new, mighty, and overwhelming desire absorbed me. With mingled terror and delight, I suffered myself to be transported by this powerful desire. It was toward the awful and beautiful being before me: it was love.

[To be continued]