l race of children, rambling here and there in a golden age of
innocence and ignorance, where at every step each gifted discoverer
whispered to the few, some half-concealed secret of nature, or played
with some toy of art; some invention which with great difficulty
performed what, without it, might have been done with great ease. The
cabinets of the lovers of mechanical arts formed enchanted apartments,
where the admirers feared to stir or look about them; while the
philosophers themselves half imagined they were the very thaumaturgi,
for which the world gave them too much credit, at least for their quiet!
Would we run after the shadows in this gleaming land of moonshine, or
sport with these children in the fresh morning of science, ere Aurora
had scarcely peeped on the hills, we must enter into their feelings,
view with their eyes, and believe all they confide to us; and out of
these bundles of dreams sometimes pick out one or two for our own
dreaming. They are the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights'
entertainments of science. But if the reader is stubbornly mathematical
and logical, he will only be holding up a great torch against the muslin
curtain, upon which the fantastic shadows playing upon it must vanish at
the instant. It is an amusement which can only take place by carefully
keeping himself in the dark.[197]

What a subject, were I to enter on it, would be the narratives of
magical writers! These precious volumes have been so constantly wasted
by the profane, that now a book of real magic requires some to find it,
as well as a great magician to use it. Albertus Magnus, or Albert the
Great, as he is erroneously styled--for this sage only derived this
enviable epithet from his surname _De Groot_, as did Hugo Grotius--this
sage, in his "Admirable Secrets," delivers his opinion that these books
of magic should be most preciously preserved; for, he prophetically
added, the time is arriving when they would be understood! It seems they
were not intelligible in the thirteenth century; but if Albertus has not
miscalculated, in the present day they may be! Magical terms with
talismanic figures may yet conceal many a secret; gunpowder came down to
us in a sort of anagram, and the kaleidoscope, with all its interminable
multiplications of forms, lay at hand for two centuries in Baptista
Porta's "Natural Magic." The abbot Trithemius, in a confidential letter,
happened to call himself a magician, perhaps at the moment he tho