“A thousand times better than the microscope,” said he to himself again.  “Atoms are annoying and disgusting to look at, with their incomprehensible and frightful minuteness, and their horrible celerity.  One does not like to think that everything is composed of myriads, be they ever so beautiful,—­which they are not, that ever I could see, but chiefly all head or a wriggling tail.  Bah!  This is much better.  Hark!  I can hear the waves dash,—­the hope-song of the child,—­and the breeze moving against the delicate sails!

“How delightful it will be to travel, with this new-found faculty!  Whenever I choose, I can have the talking bird, the singing tree, and the laughing water!  I always thought those peeps into irrational nature the chief charm of the Arabian tales.  How little did I dream of ever being able to read with my own eyes the riddle of the world!  By-the-way, let me look at my Graces, and see if they, too, are conscious forms of beauty.”

He turned to the group.  Alas! even the Graces were not proof against the ordeal of constant society.  Perhaps, if he had reflected, he would not have expected it.  In truth, it was surprising to see how many disagreeable sentiments they all three contrived to express, without untwining their arms, or loosening their fond and graceful hold on each other.  A slight elevation of the eyebrow, a curve of the lovely mouth, or a shrug from the Parian shoulders,—­how expressive,—­how surprising!  But Fred need not have been surprised; they never set up for Faith, Hope, and Charity.  What he most wondered at was that they still looked so lovely, when they were clearly full of all pagan naughtiness.  They might as well have been women.

Fred pondered on this for some time.  Then, it seemed, everything had a latent life in it.  He had suspected as much.  “There is always a something,” said he, “in what we make, not only beyond what we intend to make, but different from it.  We study a long time the powers of position,—­in chess, for example;—­how much is produced by one move that we did not anticipate, and perhaps cannot ascertain,—­certainly not prevent!  How many times we are wittier than we meant to be,—­striking out, by our unconscious blow, thoughts related to the one we utter, but far more brilliant,—­and ourselves becoming conscious of the very good thing we have said only by its effect on the company!  So it is, I fancy, with all our mental movements.  The brain acts independently of the will in sleep.  Why not, in a great measure, when awake?  Probably, as all Nature has a movement of its own, so all Art may be made to have, by the infusion and absorption of so much of the creative energy of the artist,—­hidden to the common eye, but palpitating to the instructed touch, throbbing or sparkling to the instructed eye.  Yes, it must be so.  The south-wind sighs a thousand times more mournfully through the keyhole than Thalberg can make it do on the piano.  What music there was in those stones the man brought round, the other day, and played on with a stick!  And now, the sound here from the gas-tube, how wailing, how sorrowful!—­now, how triumphant!”