But, beyond these, there are the illusions of which we first spoke, from which we would not willingly be awakened.  The sick man in Horace, who fancied that he was always sitting at a play, and laughed and joked, or was amazed and wept as they do in a theater, rightly complained to his friends that they had killed him, not cured him, when they roused him from his state of hallucination.  There are some illusions so beautiful, so healthful, and so pleasant, that we would that no harshness of this world’s ways, no bitter experience, no sad reality, could awaken us from them.  It is these, we fancy, that the poet tells us to trust to; such are the illusions—­so-called by the world—­to which we are always to give our faith.  It will be well if we do so.  Faith in man or woman is a comfortable creed; but you will scarcely find a man of thirty, or a woman either, who retains it.  They will tell you bitterly “they have been so deceived!” One old gentleman we know, deceived, and ever again to be deceived, who is a prey to false friends, who lends his money without surety and gets robbed, who fell in love and was jilted, who has done much good and has been repaid with much evil.  This man is much to be envied.  He can, indeed, “trust in his heart and what the world calls illusions.”  To him the earth is yet green and fresh, the world smiling and good-humored, friends are fast and loving, woman a very well-spring of innocent and unbought love.  The world thinks him an old simpleton; but he is wiser than the world.  He is not to be scared by sad proverbs, nor frightened by dark sayings.  An enviable man, he sits, in the evening of life, loving and trusting his fellow-men, and, from the mere freshness of his character, having many gathered round him whom he can still love and trust.

With another sort of philosophers all around is mere illusion, and the mind of man shall in no way be separated from it; from the beginning to the end it is all the same.  Our organization, they would have us believe, creates most of our pleasure and our pain.  Life is in itself an ecstasy.  “Life is as sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman, dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball—­all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment which they themselves give to it.  Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat.”  So fancy plays with us; but, while she tricks us, she blesses us.  The mere prosaic man, who strips the tinsel from every thing, who sneers at a bridal and gladdens at a funeral; who tests every coin and every pleasure, and tells you that it has not the true ring; who checks capering Fancy and stops her caracoling by the whip of reality, is not to be envied.  “In the life of the dreariest alderman, Fancy enters into all details, and colors them with a rosy hue,” says Emerson.  “He imitates the air and action of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes....  In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the masquerade is at its height.  Nobody drops his domino.  The chapter of fascinations is very long.  Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions.”