We are here reminded of many beautiful superstitions and legends; of the secret pool in which the daring may, at mid-moon of night, read the future; of the magic globe, on whose pure surface Britomart sees her future love, whom she must seek, arrayed in knightly armor, through a difficult and hostile world.

    A looking-glass, right wondrously aguized,
  Whose virtues through the wyde world soon were solemnized. 
    It vertue had to show in perfect sight,
  Whatever thing was in the world contayned,
    Betwixt the lowest earth and hevens hight;
  So that it to the looker appertayned,
    Whatever foe had wrought, or friend had fayned,
  Herein discovered was, ne ought mote pas,
    Ne ought in secret from the same remayned;
  Forthy it round and hollow shaped was,
  Like to the world itselfe, and seemed a World of Glas.

Faerie Queene, Book III.

Such mirrors had Cornelius Agrippa and other wizards.  The soap-bubble is such a globe; only one had need of second sight or double sight to see the pictures on so transitory a mirror.  Perhaps it is some vague expectation of such wonders, that makes us so fond of blowing them in childish years.  But, perhaps, it is rather as a prelude to the occupation of our lives, blowing bubbles where all things may be seen, that, “to the looker appertain,” if we can keep them long enough or look quick enough.

In short, were this biography of no other value, it would be most interesting as showing how the floating belief of nations, always no doubt shadowing forth in its imperfect fashion the poetic facts with their scientific exposition, is found to grow up anew in a simple, but high-wrought nature.

The fashioning spirit, working upwards from the clod to man, proffers as its last, highest essay, the brain of man.  In the lowest zoophyte it aimed at this; some faint rudiments may there be discerned:  but only in man has it perfected that immense galvanic battery that can be loaded from above, below, and around;—­that engine, not only of perception, but of conception and consecutive thought,—­whose right hand is memory, whose life is idea, the crown of nature, the platform from which spirit takes-wing.

Yet, as gradation is the beautiful secret of nature, and the fashioning spirit, which loves to develop and transcend, loves no less to moderate, to modulate, and harmonize, it did not mean by thus drawing man onward to the next state of existence, to destroy his fitness for this.  It did not mean to destroy his sympathies with the mineral, vegetable, and animal realms, of whose components he is in great part composed; which were the preface to his being, of whom he is to take count, whom he should govern as a reasoning head of a perfectly arranged body.  He was meant to be the historian, the philosopher, the poet, the king of this world, no less than the prophet of the next.