and watches for a time the flickers of his expiring fire, fingering the dusky folios, while the Princeton chimes announce the midnight, and silence envelops that quaint little imitation English city, striving so bravely amid the New Jersey oil refineries to be a home of lost causes and to dream, under the Cleveland memorial tower, like the Oxford of 1830. As he meditates there in the fitful gloaming by the hearthside—Mr. More is one of the last of the meditative men—the gossip and scandal of the evening's talk rise from his mind like a phantasmal smoke, in which the huge illusory bulk of Johnson appears but a whirling eddy in knee-buckles and the slighter form of Professor Trent but a momentary shape in frock coat, floating wisp-like heavenwards.
From his mood of recreative dissipation "P. E. M." passes into his mood of critical self-collection; thence, into his mood of philosophic contemplation; and so to his mood of mystical insight, in which space and time, like insubstantial figments of the imagination, dissolve and mingle with the smoke and the Professor and the Doctor, and drift up the flue into night and nothingness. "Such stuff as dreams are made of," murmurs the mystic, in a mood like that in which Carlyle saw through the transparent body of Louis XVI the Merovingian kings wending on their ox-carts into eternity. A chill pervades the still air of the study. Into the vacant chairs glide one by one the quiet ghosts of Henry More, the Platonist, and Sir Thomas
