There are many things, kind reader, which, in our senseless staring, we may call the signs of human weakness, but which, by a higher interpretation, become revelations of human power.  The gross and pitiable features of the world are dissolved and clarified, when by an impassioned sympathy we can penetrate to the heart of things.  We are about to pity the ragged vesture, the feeble knees, and the beseeching hand of poverty, and the cries of the oppressed and the weary; but, at a thought, Pity is slain by Reverence.  We are ready to cry out against the sluggish movement of the world and its lazy flux of life; but before the satire is spoken, we are fascinated by an undercurrent of this same world, earnest and full toward its sure goal,—­of which, indeed, we only dream; but “the dream is from God,"[3] and surer than sight.  There is a profounder calm than appears to the eye, in the quiet cottages scattered up and down among the peaceful valleys; the rest of death is more untroubled than the marble face which it leaves as its visible symbol; and sleep, “the minor mystery of death,” ([Greek:  hypnos ta mikra tou thanutou mysteria][4]) has a deeper significance than is revealed in any external token.  So what is sneeringly called the credulity of human nature is its holy faith, and, in spite of all the hard facts which you may charge upon it, is the glory of man.  It introduces us into that region where “nothing is unexpected, nothing impossible."[5] It was the glory of our childhood, and by it childhood is made immortal.  Myth herself is ever a child,—­a genuine child of the earth, indeed,—­but received among men as the child of Heaven.

Upon the slightest material basis have been constructed myths and miracles and fairy-tales without number; and so it must ever be.  Thus man asserts his own inherent strength of imagination and faith over against the external fact.  Whatsoever is facile to Imagination is also facile to Faith.  Easy, therefore, in our thoughts, is the transition from the Cinder-wench in the ashes to the Cinderella of the palace; easy the apotheosis of the slave, and the passage from the weary earth to the fields of Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed.

This flight of the Imagination, this vision of Faith,—­these, reader, are only for the epoptae.  It matters not, that, by naked analysis, you can prove that the palaces of our fancy and the temples of our faith are but the baseless fabric of a dream.  It may be that the greater part of life is made up of dreams, and that wakefulness is merely incidental as a relief to the picture.  It may be, indeed, in the last analysis, that the ideal is the highest, if not the only real.