discredits the alchemist's dogmas, your learning informs you that
all alchemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those whose
discoveries prove them to have been the nearest allies to your
practical knowledge, ever hint in their mystical works at the
reality of that realm which is open to magic--ever hint that some
means less familiar than furnace and bellows are essential to him
who explores the elixir of life. He who once quaffs that elixir,
obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits
the force of his will to agencies dormant in Nature, to giants
unseen in the space. And here, as he passes the boundary which
divides his allotted and normal mortality from the regions and
races that magic alone can explore, so, here, he breaks down the
safeguard between himself and the tribes that are hostile. Is it
not ever thus between man and man? Let a race the most gentle and
timid and civilized dwell on one side a river or mountain, and
another have home in the region beyond, each, if it pass not the
intervening barrier, may with each live in peace. But if ambitious
adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river, with design to
subdue and enslave the population they boldly invade, then all the
invaded arise in wrath and defiance--the neighbors are changed into
foes. And therefore this process--by which a simple though rare
material of Nature is made to yield to a mortal the boon of a life
which brings, with its glorious resistance to Time, desires and
faculties to subject to its service beings that dwell in the earth
and the air and the deep--has ever been one of the same peril which
an invader must brave when he crosses the bounds of his nation. By
this key alone you unlock all the cells of the alchemist's lore; by
this alone understand how a labor, which a chemist's crudest
apprentice could perform, has baffled the giant fathers of all your
dwarfed children of science. Nature, that stores this priceless