catalogue of common daily relations through
the masquerade of birds and beasts;--we take the cheerful hint of the
immortality of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes, as when
the gypsies say "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for
the title of their order, "Those Who are free throughout the world."
They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us
much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than
afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think
nothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental and
extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to
that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only
this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper,
and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. All
the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa,
Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces
questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic,
astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have
of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also is
the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the
world like a ball in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems;
how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the
power to sap and upheave nature; how great the perspective! nations,
times, systems, enter and disappear like threads in tapestry of large
figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the
drunkenness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in
our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of
the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in
a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state
of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably
dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is
wonderful. What if you come near to it; you are as remote when you are
nearest as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every
heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who
in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior
has yielded us a new t