; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all
his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears
of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming
extent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all
its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is
rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things
as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of
mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to
feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain
times that ourselves should be like a mere window--as clear, as
luminous, and as invisible.

In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it
is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the
luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or
a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the
cosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature. That
the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own
foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off
for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting
forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as
incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like
gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on
their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.
Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible
landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a
miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the
hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not
have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in
the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage
whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming
larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller
and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the
whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to
him as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. He
rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and
forget them; he may discover fresh