too, respond to these vibrations and are demonologists in our secret hearts.
For the interest which we take in genius has its root in the interest which we take in ourselves. Genius but utters experiences common to us all, records perceptions of a world-order which we too have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a noetic value—"some veil did fall"—revealing visions remembered even unto the hour of death.
"DEATH"
That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his being able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure of attention to life—so complete a failure that memory brings back nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams—yet even this little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.
Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms. Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the meaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, those parchments where are written the last testament of the departed spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy, sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, save when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.