pharmacy for the soul as well as the body, and do the nurslings of the
summer minister not only to human health but spiritual immortality?"

"If," answered Mejnour, "before one property of herbalism was known to
them, a stranger had visited a wandering tribe,--if he had told the
savages that the herbs, which every day they trampled underfoot, were
endowed with the most potent virtues; that one would restore to health a
brother on the verge of death; that another would paralyze into idiocy
their wisest sage; that a third would strike lifeless to the dust their
most stalwart champion; that tears and laughter, vigor and disease,
madness and reason, wakefulness and sleep, existence and dissolution,
were coiled up in those unregarded leaves,--would they not have held him
a sorcerer or a liar? To half the virtues of the vegetable world
mankind are yet in the darkness of the savages I have supposed. There
are faculties within us with which certain herbs have affinity, and over
which they have power. The moly of the ancients was not all a fable."

One evening, Glyndon had lingered alone and late upon the ramparts,--
watching the stars as, one by one, they broke upon the twilight. Never
had he felt so sensibly the mighty power of the heavens and the earth
upon man! how much the springs of our intellectual being are moved and
acted upon by the solemn influences of Nature! As a patient on whom,
slowly and by degrees, the agencies of mesmerism are brought to bear, he
acknowledged to his heart the growing force of that vast
and universal magnetism which is the life of creation, and binds the
atom to the whole. A strange and ineffable consciousness of power, of
the something great within the perishable clay, appealed to feelings at
once dim and glorious,--rather faintly recognized than all unknown. An
impulse that he could not resist led him to seek the mystic. He would
demand, that hour, his initiation into the worlds beyond our world; he