in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems;
how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature; how great
the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and
disappear like threads in tapestry of large figure and
many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the
drunkenness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy,
our religion, in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this
liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who,
blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a
drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the
waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.
The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we
are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it;
you are as remote when you are nearest as when you
are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every
heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet,
the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or
in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded
us a new thought. He unlocks our chains and admits
us to a new scene.

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power
to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and
scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore
all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend
to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him,