iation, I
know not any distress can compare with the sensation of awaking to the
consciousness that our cups have so ministered to imagination that we
have given a mythical narrative of ourself and our belongings, and have
built up a card edifice of greatness that must tumble with the first
touch of truth.

It was a sincere satisfaction to me that I saw nothing of the skipper on
that "next morning." He was so occupied with all the details of getting
into port, that I escaped his notice, and contrived to land unremarked.
Little scraps of my last night's biography would obtrude themselves upon
me, mixed up strangely with incidents of that same skipper's life, so
that I was actually puzzled at moments to remember whether "he" was not
the descendant of the famous rebel friend of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and
_I_ it was who was sold in the public square at Tunis.

These dissolving views of an evening before are very difficult
problems,--not to _you_, most valued reader, whose conscience is not
burglariously assaulted by a riotous imagination, but to the poor weak
Potts-like organizations, the men who never enjoy a real sensation, or
taste a real pleasure, save on the hypothesis of a mock situation.

I sat at my breakfast in the "Goat" meditating these things. The
grand problem to resolve was this: Is it better to live a life of
dull incidents and commonplace events in one's own actual sphere, or,
creating, by force of imagination, an ideal status, to soar into a
region of higher conceptions and more pictorial situations? What could
existence in the first case offer me? A wearisome beaten path, with
nothing to interest, nothing to stimulate me. On the other side lay
glorious regions of lovely scenery, peopled with figures the most
graceful and attractive. I was at once the associate of the wise, the
witty, and the agreeable, with wealth at my command, and great
prizes within my reach. Illusions all! to be sure; but what are not
illusions,--if by that word you take mere account of permanence? What is
it in this world that we love to believe real is not illusionary,--the
question of duration being the only difference? Is not beauty
perishable? Is not wit soon exhausted? What becomes of the proudest
physical strength after middle life is reached? What of eloquence when
the voice fails or loses its facility of inflection?

All these considerations, however convincing to myself, were not equally
satisfactory as regarded others;