ck of my unwalled, solitary realm,
I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds
I visit as mine own for one poor patch
Of this dull spheroid and a little breath
To shape in word or deed to serve my kind.

Was ever giant's dungeon dug so deep,
Was ever tyrant's fetter forged so strong,
Was e'er such deadly poison in the draught
The false wife mingles for the trusting fool,
As he whose willing victim is himself,
Digs, forges, mingles, for his captive soul?

VII

I was very sure that the old Master was hard at work about
something,--he is always very busy with something,--but I mean something
particular.

Whether it was a question of history or of cosmogony, or whether he was
handling a test-tube or a blow-pipe; what he was about I did not feel
sure; but I took it for granted that it was some crucial question or
other he was at work on, some point bearing on the thought of the time.
For the Master, I have observed, is pretty sagacious in striking for the
points where his work will be like to tell. We all know that class of
scientific laborers to whom all facts are alike nourishing mental food,
and who seem to exercise no choice whatever, provided only they can get
hold of these same indiscriminate facts in quantity sufficient. They
browse on them, as the animal to which they would not like to be
compared browses on his thistles. But the Master knows the movement of
the age he belongs to; and if he seems to be busy with what looks like
a small piece of trivial experimenting, one may feel pretty sure that he
knows what he is about, and that his minute operations are looking to a
result that will help him towards attaining his great end in life,--an
insight, so far as his faculties and opportunities will allow, into that
order of things which he believes he can study with some prospect of
taking in its significance.

I became so anxious to know what particular matter he was busy with,
that I had to call upon him to satisfy my curiosity. It was with a
little trepidation that I knocked at his door. I felt a good deal as
one might have felt on disturbing an alchemist at his work, at the very
moment, it might be, when he was about to make projection.

--Come in!--said the Master in his grave, massive tones.

I passed through the library with him into a little room evidently
devoted to his experiments.

--You have come just at the right moment,--he said.--Your eyes