t the most important and most sublime of all their truths was,
in effect, attained? I mean the truth of Gravitation. Newton owed it to
Kepler. Kepler admitted that his three laws were guessed at--these
three laws of all laws which led the great Inglitch mathematician to his
principle, the basis of all physical principle--to go behind which we
must enter the Kingdom of Metaphysics. Kepler guessed--that is to say
imagined. He was essentially a "theorist"--that word now of so much
sanctity, formerly an epithet of contempt. Would it not have puzzled
these old moles too, to have explained by which of the two "roads" a
cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph of more than usual secrecy, or
by which of the two roads Champollion directed mankind to those enduring
and almost innumerable truths which resulted from his deciphering the
Hieroglyphics.

One word more on this topic and I will be done boring you. Is it not
passing strange that, with their eternal prattling about roads to Truth,
these bigoted people missed what we now so clearly perceive to be the
great highway--that of Consistency? Does it not seem singular how they
should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vital fact that
a perfect consistency must be an absolute truth! How plain has been our
progress since the late announcement of this proposition! Investigation
has been taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given, as a
task, to the true and only true thinkers, the men of ardent imagination.
These latter theorize. Can you not fancy the shout of scorn with which
my words would be received by our progenitors were it possible for them
to be now looking over my shoulder? These men, I say, theorize; and
their theories are simply corrected, reduced, systematized--cleared,
little by little, of their dross of inconsistency--until, finally, a
perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid admit,
because it is a consistency, to be an absolute and an unquestionable
truth.

April 4.--The new gas is doing wonders, in conjunction with the new
improvement with gutta percha. How very safe, commodious, manageable,
and in every respect convenient are our modern balloons! Here is an
immense one approaching us at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty
miles an hour. It seems to be crowded with people--perhaps there are
three or four hundred passengers--and yet it soars to an elevation of
nearly a mile, looking down upon poor us with sovereign conte