It is when we do not have to believe,
but come into actual contact with Truth, and are related to her
in the most direct and intimate way. Waves of serener life pass
over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the
fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap
flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch
away from our present as they do in history. All the events
which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our
private experiences. Suddenly and silently the eras which we
call history awake and glimmer in us, and _there_ is room for
Alexander and Hannibal to march and conquer. In short, the
history which we read is only a fainter memory of events which
have happened in our own experience. Tradition is a more
interrupted and feebler memory.
This world is but canvas to our imaginations. I see men with
infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies, what I,
with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagination,--its
capacities; for certainly there is a life of the mind above the
wants of the body, and independent of it.
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