10 PROLEGOMENON. 



vocal another moment of the harmonious and divine silences 

 which hold the worlds in their spells ? 



This is the beginning and substance of the story, also 

 something of its "to whom related" and by whom created, 

 of the why of its appearance, the how it came about, 

 and the what it is; or a word on the advent to the Moun- 

 tain, its mission and motive, with a cursory notice of 

 some of the beautiful experiences involved in that crusade 

 against disease and death. A village Doctor the "fool 

 of ideas," "poorly tied to a few thoughts," victimized 

 by dreams discovers himself to be violently seized and 

 carried irresistibly away by a number of despotic per- 

 ceptions and intense convictions; among which the self- 

 sufficiency of the universe shone forth, and ESPECIALLY 

 the REMEDIAL FORCES of nature, and her perpetually 

 divine conatus to restore and reproduce, as by the cura- 

 tive powers and medicinal virtues of climates, changes of 

 localities, with accompanying changes of whole habitat, of 

 air, water, magnetism, heat, and light, of all earthly and 

 heavenly influences upon the body, sanitary impressions 

 of the world through the soul upon the body, of the aromal, 

 the spiritual, as well as material and dynamic, powers of 

 the earth, operating prophylactically and therapeutically 

 upon that darling of Fate, man; nursing him maternally 

 when sick, dandling him like a babe when well, and han- 

 dling him like a toy perpetually; streaming through him 

 like an^Eolian harp, rather playing upon him as "a STRING 

 of the^Eolian harp of the universe." He pursues a halluci- 

 nation of being an JEsculapian regenerator of his race to a 

 distant mountain-top, the great summit-wave of the Appa- 

 lachian chain, a hydrographic axis between the waters of 

 the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and more than two 

 thousand feet above the level of the sea; where, near a 

 group of springs, surrounded by unbroken masses of primi- 

 tive forests, he locates, and founds by legal enactment of 

 the Legislature of Pennsylvania, a sanitarium, under the 

 name, style, and title of the " Alleghany Mountain Health 



