assumes order and comes to our use; and as long as the breach can be kept open and the detachment perfect, how easily we write!  But if we drop the thread of our idea without knotting it, or looping it to some fact,—­if we stop our work without leaving something inserted to keep the breach open, how soon all becomes a blank! the wound heals instantly; the equilibrium which we had for a moment arrested again asserts itself, and our work is a fragment and must always remain so.  Neither wife nor friends nor fortune nor appetite should call one from his work, when he is possessed by this spirit and can utter his thought.  We are caught up into these regions rarely enough; let us not come down till we are obliged.

The fullest development of this law, as it appears in the intellect, is Analogy.  Analogy is the highest form of expression, the poetry of speech; and is detachment carried so far that it goes full circle and gives a sense of unity and wholeness again.  It is the spheral form appearing in thought.  The idea is not only detached, but is wedded to some outward object, so that spirit and matter mutually interpret each other.  Nothing can be explained by itself, or, in the economy of Nature, is explained by itself.  The night explains the day, and the day interprets the night.  Summer gives character to winter, and in winter we best understand the spirit of summer.  The shore defines and emphasizes the sea, and the sea gives form and meaning to the shore.

To measure grain, we must have a bushel; and to confine water and air, we must have other than water and air to do it with.  The bird flies by balancing itself against something else; the mountain is emphasized by the valley; and one color is brought out and individualized by another.  Our mood of yesterday is understood and rendered available by our mood of to-day; and what we now experience will be read aright only when seen from the grounds of an opposite experience.  Our life here will not be duly appreciated and its meaning made clear till seen from the life beyond.

The spiritual canopies the material as the sky canopies the earth, and is reached and expressed only by its aid.  And this is Analogy,—­the marrying of opposite facts, the perception of the same law breaking out in a thousand different forms,—­the completing of the circle when only a segment is given.  The visible and the invisible make up one sphere of which each is a part.  We are related to both; our root is in one, our top in the other.  Our ideas date from spirit and appear in fact.  The ideal informs the actual.  This is the way the intellect detaches and gets expressed.  It is not its own interpreter, and, like everything else, is only one side of a law which is explained by the other side.  The mind is the cope and the world the draw, to use the language of the moulder.  The intellect uses the outward, as the sculptor uses marble, to embody and speak its thought.  It seizes upon a fact as upon a lever, to separate and lift up some fraction of its meaning.  From Nature, from science, from experience, it traces laws, till they appear in itself, and thus finds a thread to string its thought on.