can, long hereafter we shall see it was
no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the
threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the
law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and
nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it
is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where
our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life
are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them,
and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved had
any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us
the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near
us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not
without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life
seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also.
The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is
whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we
lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we
change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot
signify much what becomes of such castaways,--wailing, stupid, comatose
creatures,--lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the
nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.
There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe
barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played
with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy
with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish
virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in
character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all
kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as
my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined,
to all the _eclat_ in the universe. This reality is the foundation of
friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for
appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is
what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate
o