y hand
great opportunities which must not be lost, new achievements which must
be wrought, and strange adventures which must be undertaken: every day
wondering more to what our commission shall bring us at last, full of
magnificent hopes and a growing faith,--the inscrutable bundle of orders
not nearly exhausted: whole continents of knowledge yet to be discovered
and explored; the gates of yet distant sciences to be sought and
unlocked; the fortresses of yet undreamed necessities to be taken;
Arcadias of beauty to be visited and their treasures garnered by the
imagination; an intricate course to be followed amid all future nations
and governments, and their winding histories, as if threading the
devious channels of endless archipelagoes; the spoils of all ages to
be gathered, and treaties of commerce with all generations to be made,
before the mysterious voyage is done.

And now, before we leave this fascinating theme, or suffer another
dream, let us stop where we are, in order to see where we are. Let us
take our bearings. What says our chart? What do we find in the horizon
of the present, which may give us the wherewithal to hope, to doubt, or
to fear?

The era in which we live presents some remarkable characteristics,
which have been brought into it by this immense material success. It
is preeminently an age of _reality:_ an age in which a host of
unrealities--queer and strange old notions--have been destroyed forever.
Never were the vaulted spaces in this grand old temple of a world swept
so clean of cobwebs before. The mind has not gone forth working outside
wonders, without effecting equal inside changes. In achieving abroad, it
has been ennobling at home. At no time was it so free from superstition
as now, and from the absurdities which have for centuries beset and
filled it. What numberless delusions, what ghosts, what mysteries, what
fables, what curious ideas, have disappeared before the besom of the
day! The old author long ago foretasted this, who wrote,--"The divine
arts of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin Goodfellow,
and all the fairies." It is told of Kepler, that he believed the planets
were borne through the skies in the arms of angels; but science shortly
took a wider sweep, killed off the angels, and showed that the wandering
luminaries had been accustomed from infancy to take care of themselves.
And so has the firmament of all knowledge been cleared of its vapors and
fictions, and