science remakes the old spirit.  But we seem to have created too many wonders to be capable of wondering any longer; as Coleridge said, when asked if he believed in ghosts, that he had seen too many of them.  But nature all the more imperatively demands it, and science can at best but scotch it, not kill it.  In this day of newspapers and electric telegraphs, in which common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret!  Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of “Webster on Witchcraft” which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, “Well, that goblin is laid at last!”—­and while I mused the tables were turning, and the chairs beating the devil’s tattoo all over Christendom.  I have a neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son’s seventh son, and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with it.  After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin’s lamp.

It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some sort or other.  If they cannot get the best they will get some substitute for it, and thus seem to verify Saint Augustine’s slur that it is wine of devils.  The mind bound down too closely to what is practical either becomes inert, or revenges itself by rushing into the savage wilderness of “isms.”  The insincerity of our civilization has disgusted some persons so much that they have sought refuge in Indian wigwams and found refreshment in taking a scalp now and then.  Nature insists above all things upon balance.  She contrives to maintain a harmony between the material and spiritual, nor allows the cerebrum an expansion at the cost of the cerebellum.  If the character, for example, run on one side into religious enthusiasm, it is not unlikely to develop on the other a counterpoise of worldly prudence.  Thus the Shaker and the Moravian are noted for thrift, and mystics are not always the worst managers.  Through all changes of condition and experience man continues to be a citizen of the world of idea as well as the world of fact, and the tax-gatherers of both are punctual.

And these antitheses which we meet with in individual character we cannot help seeing on the larger stage of the world also, a moral accompanying a material development.  History, the great satirist, brings together Alexander and the blower of peas to hint to us that the tube of the one and the sword of the other were equally transitory; but meanwhile Aristotle was conquering kingdoms out of the unknown, and establishing a dynasty of thought from whose hand the sceptre has not yet passed.  So there are Charles V, and Luther; the expansion of trade resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, and the Elizabethan literature; the Puritans seeking spiritual El Dorados while so