"Say
not the struggle naught availeth," said a poet who was not given to
cultivating illusions. And he went on:--
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
But though I want to see a vision as much as anybody, I am out of touch
with the company of the credulous. I am with Doubting Thomas. I have no
capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark
rooms and magic. People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but
cold. I know a man--a most excellent man--whose life is a perfect debauch
of visions and revelations. He seems to discover the philosopher's stone
every other day. Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation.
If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live
until everybody is tired of you. Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of
bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption.
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