existence in the hour when nature was constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death.  And if the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the least in the hope of bettering the lot of man.  Hence, as we are willing that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of the flower of man’s spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the winds of the future for the blessing of the world’s fuller and more populous life.  Such has been the history of our civilization, and still is, and must be till the whole earth’s surface be conquered for mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social.  This is not nature’s way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man’s laurel upon our grave.  So, everywhere except in the physical sphere of life, if you would find the soul’s commands, reverse nature’s will.  This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of ’an ampler ether, a diviner air.’”

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk.  We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to our eyes.  At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, “the Looking-glass!” There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain as a pikestaff,—­a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless,—­for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste.  It was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon.  For an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing—­the earth-light of the moon on that side,—­I saw it all the time.

“The difference you spoke of,” I began, with my eyes upon that spectral pool, “is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illusion.  I am not aware of any break; it is the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood.  Life, in the soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that