ave done something so much more wild than flying. A grasshopper can go
astonishingly high up in the air, his biological limitation and weakness
is that he cannot stop there. Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous
insects can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass any communication
between it and the earth. But the army of man has advanced vertically
into infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in the
ether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road. It would
be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; but
would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon? Yet every
building of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimney
points to some star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising on
these awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and
more mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and
sticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of
these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a
black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by
reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many
a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look
forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose
nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that the
word "giddy" is used to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a high
compliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to say he
is a little giddy.

I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset, a field
of the cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house, its huge size began
to horrify me; and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with an
incredulity as strong as despair that my house was actually bigger than
myself. A minute or two before there might well have seemed to be a
monstrous and mythical competition about which of the two should swallow
the other. But I was Jonah; my house was the huge and hungry fish; and
even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had again this dreadful
fancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man. I climbed the
stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if ascending
a glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved my
hat. The very word "landing" has about it the wild sound of some one
washed up by the sea. I climbed ea