ot yet
imagined the ease and excellence of our own method of locomotion by
skimming at will the surface of the earth. The facile beauty and
natural art with which we now rise from the ground and propel
ourselves by our own thought and wish to any distance--thus
vindicating our superiority to all other creatures in our method of
excursion--are facts so obvious and ever-present that we fail to
reflect upon the impediments and hardships of the people of Am-ri-ka
and indeed of the whole world in the nineteenth century....

Thinking on these things I can but imagine that I have myself seen
them in some previous epoch of my existence. The facts which I have
recorded appear dimly, as if in memory of what I once beheld; but the
vision of it is so obscure that I still doubt whether it be dream or
reality. I have long imagined that we retain from one epoch of our
existence to the next a vague recollection of our experiences in the
remote ages of the past. I sometimes think that it is not impossible
that I myself, in some forgotten avatar, used to sit alone at the
window of my office, looking into the street of one of the old towns
of Am-ri-ka where the Trol-lees were going one way and the
By-sigh-kels the other way, crossing and darting hither and yon,
according to the wills of the riders; but the vision is so dim that it
looks like the fictions of sleep.

Vita Longa.

The question is not how long this bodily life may last, or how long
the mind, so conditioned, can endure. It is not even how long the
mind may continue to produce; for the mind, like a poor,
half-exhausted field, urged with rain and fertilizers, may produce
only potatoes, mullen, and cockle. The real question--the deep-down
essence of it--is how long the mind, or soul, may retain the
enthusiasm and passionate power of _creation_. That is the only true
test of longevity; and when that ceases there is nothing left. The
real duration of man-life is measured only by the persistency of
creative power.

Longfellow, standing in the old pulpit, on the fiftieth anniversary of
his class at Bowdoin, and saying to those who would introduce him, "I
wish the desk were large enough to conceal me all," makes a beautiful
section of this theme by citing some of the most inspiring instances
of the long life of the soul:

Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand OEdipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each ha