man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of
science remakes the old spirit. But we seem to have created too many
wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when
asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them. But
nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but
scotch it, not kill it. In this day of newspapers and electric
telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole
continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as
Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!
Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on
Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin
is laid at last!"--and while I mused the tables were turning, and the
chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a
neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed
out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son,
and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with
it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so
brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp.

It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or other. If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute
for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine's slur that it is wine
of devils. The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either
becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness
of "isms." The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some
persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found
refreshment in taking a scalp now and then. Nature insists above all