Drost AagÉ retired to rest in silence, but he vainly tried to sleep. He was uncertain whether he ought not instantly to have captured the two overbearing Hanseatics on the ground of their former menace at SjÖberg; here they were no longer ambassadors and privileged persons. If they had circulated false coin, and openly protected an outlaw upon Danish ground, they might with strict justice be called to account. The knowledge that the base KaggÉ still lived also disquieted him; but what still more banished sleep from the Drost's eyes, was the idea of the mysterious Master Thrand, and his wondrous arts. That a human being possessed such a power over nature as to be able to imitate the thunder and lightning of the heavens, with all their terrific effects, appeared to him an amazing prodigy, and what the enthusiastic Master Laurentius had said of the still deeper views of his master--of the preservation of youth by a mysterious art, and of the philosopher's stone, as something actually existent in nature, had especially inspired the meditative and somewhat visionary AagÉ with singular musings.

The countenance and mountebank deportment of the little deformed philosopher, had, indeed, awakened great doubts of his honesty, and what AagÉ had comprehended of his expressions appeared to him strange and confused, as opposed to what he had been piously taught in childhood regarding the highest and eternal truths in which, despite his unhappy excommunication, he had been confirmed by his confessor, Master Petrus de Dacia, who had succeeded in making him at peace with himself and the church. But the Iceland clerk's ardent enthusiasm for Master Thrand and his worldly wisdom had not been without its effect; and AagÉ was forced to confess there lay an acuteness and intelligence in the little mountebank's eye which he had never seen equalled in any of the pious and learned men he knew. Laurentius's open and ingenuous countenance bore witness also to the truth of his testimony as to what he had seen and admired in the disciple of the famous Roger Bacon; and the longer AagÉ pondered on what he had heard, the more doubts and strange thoughts crowded upon his mind. Master Thrand's contempt of the age in which he lived, and the confidence with which he expressed himself respecting the only true revelation of nature with which he was, above all, conversant, had also excited a feeling of strange and painful uneasiness in AagÉ's mind. The melancholy knight had often, when oppressed by the thought of his excommunication, sought peace and tranquillity in the contemplation of nature in lonely nights under a calm and starry sky, without, however, feeling able to dispense with the comfort and consolation of the church. He now stood, with his arms folded, in his sleeping chamber, gazing out on the gloomy heavens. "Were it possible!" said he to himself. "Am I wandering here with all my contemporaries in thick darkness? Know we neither our own nature nor that around us? Are all our purposes and energies but as the gropings of the blind, without aim or object? Will the time come when children will jeer at us as erring fools and insane dreamers, scared by what did not exist, and amused by empty juggling? Can this be? Can even that which is most high and sacred, which we have believed in and lived for with our fathers--for which thousands of inspired martyrs have died with a halo of glory around their beaming countenances--for which our pilgrims and Crusaders wend to Jerusalem, and renounce all the riches and treasures of this world--which was the spring of action in our ancestors' lives as our own, and made them heroes and conquerors in life and death--could all that be dreaming, deception, and ignorance? Could the existence and achievements of whole centuries have been a monstrous lie? No! No! If yonder fellow be not a liar and a cheat, there is neither truth, nor life, nor redemption, nor salvation." He shrunk with horror from his own thoughts. A sound now reached his ears which, at this moment, almost struck him with dismay. He fancied he once more heard the voice of the mysterious stranger close beside him.

"Darest thou not yet face the naked truth? my dear Laurentius!" sounded the shrill voice of the philosopher, slowly and solemnly through the thin wooden partition of the adjoining chamber. "Dost thou dread to enter into the holy calling of a Leccar Brother, and priest of nature? Dost thou tremble at an initiation into the great church of the world, of which we are all originally priests; we who have eyes for truth, and courage to announce it, despite the repeated outcry of the fools of thirteen centuries! Look, I open unto thee the great sanctuary in the name of truth and science, and in the sight of that deity who dwells in the breast of the initiated. Cast off the miserable prejudices of thy time! Throw down the phantom thou callest the Church, and a saving faith, with the same strength with which thou hast rejected the senseless fables of heathenism! Cast off all that was not given thee when thou becamest a human being! Rid thyself of all exploded and worn out doctrines--cast off the whole puerile tissue of phantasms and visions of crude ages, which thou callest Revelation! Divest thyself of thy preconceptions regarding the essence of things, and of all the pomp and imagery thou callest poetry! Then gaze freely around thee, and tell me what remains!"

"Nothing! nothing! learned master!" answered the voice of the young Icelander, in a desponding tone.

"Yes, assuredly!" was the answer; "thou thyself remainest, and great eternal nature, and, if thou wilt, a great and mighty deity, which is the soul and life of this nature of which thou art thyself a part--all truth, all wisdom lie slumbering and buried there. Wake it if thou canst! Call forth deity in thyself and in nature! Rule it by that mighty art! Ask boldly, and force it to respond!"

"That I am not able to do, my wise master!" said the voice of the young Icelander, within the partition; "but could I wake lifeless nature, and force her to solve the mysteries I gaze upon, would she answer aught else than what the dead have ever answered the living, what the dead Vola^[11] answered Odin in our ancient poems, what the spirit of Samuel answered Saul in the presence of the Witch of Endor:--'Thou shalt die! to-morrow thou shalt die!'"

"Well," resumed the philosopher, "were the answer not much more cheering, if it were but truth could a philosopher, a Leccar Brother, a priest of nature and truth demand or wish it otherwise? You will have flattery, you will all of you be cheated and deceived--therefore you cling so fast to that flattering lie, but hate and persecute truth as ungodliness, heresy, or devilry--therefore are popes and bishops, like the prophets and evangelists of old, still able to lead the whole human race blindfold round in an eternal circle of error from one age to another until they have their eyes opened, and see that they stand where their blind fathers stood, by the closed book of nature, which amid their dreaming they have forgotten to open through the lapse of ages. Look! there thou standest, my pupil! and art ready to despair, because all that fair jugglery hath vanished and been blown away by my breath as it were a spider's web, or bubbles of air! and thou seest nought but one enormous lifeless body which I call nature.--But look! the lifeless body wakes! 'Tis deity, and yet our slave,--obedient to the mightier manifestation of deity within us. Only through our means can nature's deity awake to consciousness and self-knowledge. In us, and in our will alone lives the only true God we should obey. Courage, Laurentius!--courage! Truth must make its way--the slumbering and disguised god of nature must be wakened and unveiled. It must open to us its vast recesses, it must restore to us what it hath robbed and hidden--the philosopher's stone must be found, even though its workings should seem to us eternal death and petrifaction."

All was again hushed in the adjoining chamber; AagÉ had thrown open a window, and the cool night air streamed in upon him; the sky had become clear--AagÉ raised his eyes towards the starry vault, he grasped the cross-hilt of his sword, a heavy load oppressed his heart, he bent his knee in silent devotion, and rose, feeling that his prayer was answered by the return of a calm and cheerful frame of mind. "To God be thanks and praise! I know better however," he said, with a feeling of consolation. "He, within there, is a liar and deceiver, as surely as He above is love itself! and He whom He sent unto us was the way, the truth, and the life!" AagÉ was now about to betake himself to rest, but the voice of the learned Master Thrand again caught his ear. The young Icelander he heard no more. German was now spoken, but in a low whispering tone, and the talk seemed to be on worldly matters. AagÉ tried not to overhear anything; it was repugnant to his feelings, and appeared to him dishonourable and unworthy, to become a concealed witness to the secrets of others. He thought of knocking to give notice of his presence and the thinness of the partition; but, at this moment, he heard the name of "Grand" mentioned, and he started. The whispering continued for a long time afterwards, and he caught words which caused him the greatest uneasiness. The talk was of the king and Junker Christopher, of the outlaws, of death, and downfall; but what it was he could neither hear nor comprehend, with any distinctness. At last all became silent. He conjectured that his foreign neighbour had left the inn, and towards morning AagÉ fell asleep. When he was awakened at dawn by his squire, in order to embark in a Swedish vessel, he had dreamt the most marvellous things. He fancied he had beheld an entirely changed world; without monasteries and monks, without fortified castles, without the images of the Madonna and the saints, without kings and thrones, even without women and children, and with nothing but men, with keen staring eyes and diminutive and deformed bodies, like Master Thrand's. At last it seemed to him that the sun was burnt out and hung, like a great black coal, over his head; that the moon and all the stars were pulled down and used instead of stones, for fences and inclosures round small withered cabbage gardens. All trees and flowers were torn up and peeled into fibres; all birds and animals lay slaughtered and cut open; and the little hump-backed men sat, with great spectacles, examining the putrified carcases. All that he beheld,--the whole subverted and disjointed world, seemed to him at last metamorphosed into one enormous mass of stone, and a terrific voice sounded over the petrified world, and cried "Behold! This is thy world! this is thy God! this is the philosopher's stone!" Amid his dismay at hearing this voice, AagÉ awakened, just as his brisk squire knocked at his door, still so confused by his dream that he could not distinguish between what he had dreamed, and what he thought he had heard from behind the partition.