and lying down and rising up; and in the expanse beyond the neighbourhood of the ship, they were all lying down together, or wandering like shadows over a smooth surface.  I felt grand then, I assure you.  I looked down, and around, and above, till thoughts that were not the instincts of an animal, came dancing up in my mind, like bubbles upon the face of the sea.  And as I returned slowly to the deck, these thoughts grew and multiplied, and began to arrange themselves into a form which I am not scholar enough to describe.  But through this new medium, I saw things as they are, not as habit and prejudice make them.  I did not fear the waves, and I did not despise them.  I humoured the sea as I got down towards the bulwarks, which were still buried every now and then; and so I reached my quarters in safety.

And what has all this to do with it?  I will tell you.  With the means of doing a thing, nothing is difficult, if you only understand thoroughly the nature of the thing.  The obstacles that commonly deter you are not in the thing, but in you; and until you understand this, you will keep gaping and shrinking, and saying, ‘It is impossible.’  Some folk, when looking out of a three or four storey window, feel as if they were going to fall.  This is their own fault, not the fault of the window, for that is just like a parlour window, where they have no sensation of the sort.  A man sits peaceably enough on the top of a tall, three-legged stool, and could hitch himself round and round, and then get up and stand upon it erect for half a day, without any risk of falling.  Now, a steeple is much more securely fixed than a stool; its top is as broad as a table; and there is nothing to prevent anybody from standing upon it as long as he pleases, if he only will not think he is going to fall.  You go up half-a-dozen steps of a ladder without fear, and then persuade yourself you can go no farther; but there is nothing more dangerous in the next half-dozen, so far as they are themselves concerned; nor in the next hundred, nor the next thousand, for that matter.  My secret consists in my knowing all this, although I feel that I have only described when, not how the knowledge came.  Perhaps you, who are book-learned, may be able to make it out, and shew how it is that, when anything occurs to awaken the mind, and enable one to work from knowledge, not habit, he is ten times the man he was.  Without this, I should have climbed a mast all my life; but with it, I took to leaping up steeples by means of a kite, in a way that makes many ignorant persons report that I manage it by holding on by the tail.