e because it was so
different, and forthwith presented me with Emerson's Essays, the first
book that I have any knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth
year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with the terrors and the
majestical inferences of the moment, the hour, and the day. I was
alone with them, and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in
their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul with the
legendary splendors of Friendship, and The Oversoul-Circles, and
Compensation, each of these words of exciting largeness in themselves,
I turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, which, of course,
was in no way to be believed because it did not exist. And then came
expansion and release into the outer world again through
interpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself.

I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs through these magical
books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge
myself in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea.

But the fairy story is nothing after all but a means whereby we, as
children, may arrive at some clue as to the significance of things
around us, and it is through them the child finds his way out from
incoherency toward comprehension. The universe is a vast place, as we
all know who think we comprehend it in admiring it. The things we
cannot know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison with the
few we can know. I can know, for instance, that my morning is the new
era of my existence, and that I shall never live through another like
it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in my memory, which
was Yesterday. Yesterday was my event in experience then, as it is my
event in memory now. I am related to the world by the way I feel
attached to the life of it as exemplified in the vividness of the
moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled to
extract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it
precisely as the squirrel does the shell of the nut.

I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation--which is to say,
the proper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable
diversion. It is necessary for everyone to poetize his sensations in
order to comprehend them. Weakness in the direction of philosophy
creates the quality of dogmatic interrogation. A preoccupancy with
religious characteristics assists those who are interested in the
problem of sublimation. The romantici