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stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience
had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of
these stones--in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of
the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which
stood around--above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this
arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.
Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he
said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the
walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the
destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him--what
he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.
*
Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of
Landaff.--See "Chemical Essays," vol v.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over
such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of
Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage
of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean
D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of
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