This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of present time.  Who is he that does not always find himself doing something less than his best task?  “What are you doing?” “Oh, nothing; I have been doing thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only—­” Ah! poor dupe, will you never slip out of the web of the master juggler?—­never learn that, as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glory between to-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?  How difficult to deal erect with them!  The events they bring, their trade, entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all throw dust in the eyes and distract attention.  He is a strong man who can look them in the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and keep his own; who can know surely that one will be like another to the end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or politics, or money, war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.

The world is always equal to itself, and every man in moments of deeper thought is apprised that he is repeating the experiences of the people in the streets of Thebes or Byzantium.  An everlasting Now reigns in nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the Roman and the Chaldean in their hanging gardens.  “To what end, then,” he asks, “should I study languages, and traverse countries, to learn so simple truths?”

History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and inscriptions,—­yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools.  What journeys and measurements,—­Niebuhr and Muller and Layard,—­to identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town!  And your homage to Dante costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost.  Poor child! that flexible clay of which these old brothers molded their admirable symbols was not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was common lime and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood, and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in sepulchers, mummy pits, and old bookshops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and England.  It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty, which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit for the tattle of towns.  He lurks, he hides,—­he who is success, reality, joy, and power.  One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour.  Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.  No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.  ’T is the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.  ’T is the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels.  Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes,