we are ready to think that they had a
wider field than we for speculation, that truth being all unknown it was
easier to take the first step in its paths. But is the region of truth
limited? Is it not infinite?... We know a few things which were once
hidden, and being known they seem easy; but there are the flashings of
the Northern Lights--'Across the lift they start and shift;' there is
the conical zodiacal beam seen so beautifully in the early evenings of
spring and the early mornings of autumn; there are the startling comets,
whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and flickering
variable stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric
showers--and for all of these the reasons are as clear as for the
succession of day and night; they lie just beyond the daily mist of our
minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced through it."

CHAPTER III

1855-1857

EXTRACTS FROM DIARY--RACHEL--EMERSON--A HARD WINTER

"Jan. 1, 1855. I put some wires into my little transit this morning. I
dreaded it so much, when I found yesterday that it must be done, that it
disturbed my sleep. It was much easier than I expected. I took out the
little collimating screws first, then I drew out the tube, and in that I
found a brass plate screwed on the diaphragm which contained the lines.
I was at first a little puzzled to know which screws held this diaphragm
in its place, and, as I was very anxious not to unscrew the wrong ones,
I took time to consider and found I need turn only two. Then out slipped
the little plate with its three wires where five should have been, two
having been broken. As I did not know how to manage a spider's web, I
took the hairs from my own head, taking care to pick out white ones
because I have no black ones to spare. I put in the two, after first
stretching them over pasteboard, by sticking them with sealing-wax
dissolved in alcohol into the little grooved lines which I found. When I
had, with great labor, adjusted these, as I thought, firmly, I perceived
that some of the wax was on the hairs and would make them yet coarser,
and they were already too coarse; so I washed my little camel's-hair
brush which I had been using, and began to wash them with clear alcohol.
Almost at once I washed out another wire and soon another and another. I
went to work patiently and put in the five perpendicular ones besides
the horizontal one, which, like the others, had frizzled up and appeared
to melt away. With