He who once quaffs that elixir,
obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits the
force of his will to agencies dormant in nature, to giants unseen in the
space. And here, as he passes the boundary which divides his allotted
and normal mortality from the regions and races that magic alone can
explore, so, here, he breaks down the safeguard between himself and the
tribes that are hostile. Is it not ever thus between man and man? Let a
race the most gentle and timid and civilized dwell on one side a river
or mountain, and another have home in the region beyond, each, if it
pass not the intervening barrier, may with each live in peace. But
if ambitious adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river, with
design to subdue and enslave the population they boldly invade, then
all the invaded arise in wrath and defiance,--the neighbours are changed
into foes. And therefore this process--by which a simple though rare
material of nature is made to yield to a mortal the boon of a life which
brings, with its glorious resistance to Time, desires and faculties to
subject to its service beings that dwell in the earth and the air and
the deep--has ever been one of the same peril which an invader must
brave when he crosses the bounds of his nation. By this key alone you
unlock all the cells of the alchemist's lore; by this alone understand
how a labour, which a chemist's crudest apprentice could perform, has
baffled the giant fathers of all your dwarfed children of science.
Nature, that stores this priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding
it to man; the invisible tribes that abhor him, oppose themselves to
the gain that might give them a master. The duller of those who were
the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance,
trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of
fruition,--some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect
in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the
bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by falling asleep
by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves
visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they mock at his toils
from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers, equally foiled in
despite of their patience and skill, would have said, 'Not with us rests
the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight. But out
from the caldron dread faces arose, and the spectres