upon the world, the multiplication-table, and reading and writing, are
far better than amulet, rosary, and crucifix.

After all, this light of common day, which the bards and saints so much
condemn and disdain, when subjected to the microscopic and telescopic
ken of modern science, opens as large a field for wonder and for the
imagination to revel in as did the old marvels, fables, and fictions of
the Past. The True is beginning to be found as strange, nay, stranger
than the purely Imaginative and Mythic. The Beautiful and the Good will
yet be found to be as consistent with the strictly True and Actual,
with the plain Matter-of-Fact as it is called, as they have been, in
the heroic ages of human-achievement and endurance, with the glorious
cheats and delusions that nerved man to high emprise. The modern
scientific discoverer and inventor oftentimes finds himself engaged in
quests as strange as that of the Holy Grail of Round-Table fiction. To
the Past, with its mythic delusions, simplicity, and dense ignorance of
Nature, we can never return, any more than the mature man can shrink
into the fresh boy again. Nor is it to be regretted. The distant in
time, like the distant in space, wears a halo, a vague, blue
loveliness, which is all unreal. The tired wayfarer, who is weary with
the dust, the din, and stony footing of the Actual and the Present, may
sometimes fondly imagine, that, if he could return to the far Past, he
would find all smooth and golden there; but it is a pleasant delusion
of that glorious arch-cheat, the Imagination. Yet if we cannot go back
to the Past, we can march forward to a Future, which opens a deeper and
more wondrous and airier vista, with its magicians of the Actual
casting into shade the puny achievements of old necromancy and mythic
agencies.