ife is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be
understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snowstorm. We wake
from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and
are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual
man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is
drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with
music and banner and badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a
sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show
in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the
glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a
search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.
At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of
fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had
a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that
perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth
with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best
comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could
only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for
something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why
need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them?

I knew a humorist who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of
sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God
were two--power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious
man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in
the community, but whose sympathies were cold,--presidents of colleges,
and governors, and senators,--who held themselves bound to sign every
temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and
peacemakers, and cry, _Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog. We must not carry
comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the
boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter
into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly,
fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy
chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid
on