re are minds who have simply advanced in knowledge beyond
the multitude in certain things which cannot at once be made common
property is true, for there is a great deal of marvelous truth not as
yet dreamed of even by HERBERT SPENCERS or EDISONS, by RONTGENS or
other scientists. And yet herein is hidden the greatest secret of
future human happenings.

"What I was is passed by,
What I am away doth fly;
What I shall be none do see,
Yet in that my glories be."

Now to illustrate this more clearly. Some of these persons who are
more or less secretly addicted to magic (I say secretly, because they
cannot make it known if they would), take the direction of feeling or
living with inexpressible enjoyment in the beauties of nature. That,
they attain to something almost or quite equal to life in Fairyland,
is conclusively proved by the fact that only very rarely, here and
there in their best passages, do the greatest poets more than
imperfectly and briefly convey some broken idea or reflection of the
feelings which are excited by thousands of subjects in nature in many.
The Mariana of TENNYSON surpasses anything known to me in any language
as conveying the reality of feeling alone in a silent old house, where
everything is a dim, uncanny manner, recalled the past--yet suggested
a kind of mysterious presence--as in the passage:

"All day within the dreary house
The doors upon their hinges creaked,
The blue fly sang in the pane, the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peered about;
Old faces glimmered thro' the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without."

Yet even this unsurpassed poem does no more than _partially_ revive
and recall the reality to me of similar memories of long, long ago,
when an invalid child I was often left in a house entirely alone, from
which even the servants had absented themselves. Then I can remember
how after reading the Arabian Nights or some such unearthly romance,
as was the mode in the Thirties, the very sunshine stealing craftily
and silently like a living thing, in a bar through the shutter,
twinkling with dust, as with infinitely small stars, living and dying
like sparks, the buzzing of the flies who were little blue imps, with
now and then a larger Beelzebub--a strange imagined voice ever about,
which seemed to say something without words--and the very furniture,
wherein th