aint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of,
have really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make their
pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not that
mediaeval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to break
forth in middle winter?

May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch upon
these things too?

Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
influence the imagination of others more directly in past times. Instead
of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have sat for hours
imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts of the wood, till
the images were so vivid that the passers-by became but a part of the
imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or ran away as he would
have them. Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the
sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm,
to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by? These very words, a
chief part of all praises of music or poetry, still cry to us their
origin. And just as the musician or the poet enchants and charms and binds
with a spell his own mind when he would enchant the mind of others, so did
the enchanter create or reveal for himself as well as for others the
supernatural artist or genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of
many minds, whose work I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He
kept the doors too, as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the
genius of the family, the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was
mighty-souled enough, the genius of the world. Our history speaks of
opinions and discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had
their eyes ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and
revelations. They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and
its thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are
always praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
perfection.

VI

I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into a
profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In her
waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kin