hat is behind it. 'Tis the charm
of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry
and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred
to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as
well as Caesar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a
gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are
illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the
cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as "dragon-ridden,"
"thunder-stricken," and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know
that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the
phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and
beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away
fatigue"; but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at the
Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our
faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You
play with jack-straws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics;
but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will
show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must
migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion,
"the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with
in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play
and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself,
and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are
learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples,
cities, and men were swallowed up and all trace of them gone. We are
coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all
vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were
framed upon.

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the
structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There
is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which
that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay,
with the human mind itself. 'Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna
Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with
one window, through which the fa