"
"Yes, Mac, the new life dawns upon me,--no Plotinian trance, no somnambulic
introspection, but a genuine awakening of the soul to a sense of its own
beauty."
"Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson would say. Nay, I am not laughing at you,
Clarian," said Mac, pointing to the picture; "_there_ is enough to make me
believe in you, though how you achieved it I cannot imagine."
"The means, Mac? Is not that rather my question than yours? We judge
ourselves from within; 'others judge us by what we have done,' says
Goethe. The means, ha, and the motive? Why will men seek stumblingly after
these, when actually their sole concern is with the thing done? So, you two
look at me,--I was but pondering,--putting a case;--so far, the means here
have been simple and innocent,--my hand, my eye, my brain, my purpose;
but--Mac!" added he, suddenly, after a pause, "did you never, in reading
Rabelais, feel that somehow there was a profound and reverential symbolism
underlying the wild froth of words in which the histories of Gargantua and
Pantagruel have come down to us? that in all that _olla-podrida_ of filth,
quip, jest, wicked folly, and mad wisdom, was yet hidden, like the pearl in
the oyster, a deep and most mystic system of world-philosophy?"
"Anan?" said Mac, looking at the boy curiously.
"For instance, in what the good Cure of Meudon says about the 'herb
Pantagruelion',--did the symbolism and esoteric meaning of all that never
strike you?"
"Oh, yes," cried Mac, with a singularly significant smile, "I see how it is
now.
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