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Of the appearance of light in the state of introversion, the histories of saints and ecstatics, and the autobiographies of this kind of men are full. An enormous number of instances might be given.

"Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit as strange as those of ecstatics.

The altar was always bare except at these times, and none ascended it but priests, ecstatics, and the man who carried the god. Only he and the high priest might touch this idol. The demoniacs were usually in collusion with the priests, willy-nilly. The idol was the king's or prince's god. Each had his own.

Now there was never a man who was better pleased than I am to learn that he has given pleasure to another by his work. I dare imitate the candour of Oliver Wendell Holmes and confess that I am fond of sweetmeats, but one can have too much even of sugar-plums, and I was getting a little weary of my friend's ecstatics when he began to change his tone.

The idol-carriers were tabu. Their persons might not be touched nor their food. The sorcerers, ecstatics, and demoniacs were not regularly organized into a caste. When a man fancied himself possessed by a god, he became a recognized saint. He was tabu. He ascended to the altar and danced or gyrated as he pleased.

He had brought with him a complex copper implement, which his friends had supposed was a new species of theodolite, but which turned out to be a scientific coffee-pot, in the development of which and its purposes, as the man of science carefully explained, there was called into play some of the principles involved in the sciences of hydraulics and pneumatics, to which list Lewis added, in an under-tone, those of aquatics, ecstatics, and rheumatics.

The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult, Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and passages in our fabliaux, these things alone have power to carry me back to the divine heights of my first love.

Know, then, that I was in Jerusalem with certain saints and ecstatics, and did not magnify myself among them, for that God had endowed me with humility and abnegation, till one night I chanced to go down to the lake and walked upon the water.

It is perfectly true and we need not go out of England to learn it that piety is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly affairs. But the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of nine-tenths of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor and not of the saint.

As a rule, they insisted on believing it a "petrified giant," and those who did not dwelt on its perfections as an ancient statue. They saw in it a whole catalogue of fine qualities; and one writer went into such extreme ecstatics that he suddenly realized the fact, and ended by saying, "but this is rather too high-flown, so I had better conclude."