'I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,' said I, 'that you speak in such enigmas
that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.'
'I wish,' said Wilderspin, 'that all enigmas were as soluble as this.
Let me ask you a question, sir. When you stood before my picture,
"Faith and Love," in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it
and the predella were inspired entirely by your father's great work,
_The Veiled Queen_, or rather that they are mere pictorial
renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man's soul in
its loftiest development?'
I had never heard of the picture in question. As for the book, my
father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk
from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply
antiquarian kind. In Switzerland, however, after his death, while
waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a
few days' reading, acquainted with _The Veiled Queen_. It was a new
edition containing an 'added chapter,' full of subtle spiritualistic
symbols. Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the
veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man's reason, not by such
researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental
evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of
burning eloquence.
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