Extract from Proverbial Philosophy (Series iv. p. 375).

    Of Change and Travel.

    “All of us have within us the wandering Crusoe spirit;
    We come of Norse sea-rovers, and adventurers full of hope: 
    And man was bade to tame his earth, to rule it and subdue it,—­
    Whereby our feet-soles tingle at an untrod Alpine peak—­
    But shall we not fly anon with wings, to shame these creeping paces,
    Even as steam hath worked all speed on land and sea before? 
    Is not this firmament of air part of the human heritage,
    Which man must conquer duteously, as first his Maker willed? 
    There needeth but a lighter gas, well-tutored to our skill,
    The springing spirit to some shape of delicate steel and silk,—­
    A bird-like frame of Daedalus, and gummed Icarian plumes,
    Ancient inventions, long forgotten, to be found anew! 
    When shall the chemist mix aright this rarer lifting essence
    To make the lord of earth but equal to his many sparrows? 
    When will discovery help us to such conquest of the air,
    And teach us swifter travel than our creeps by land and water?”

And finally from my “Three Hundred Sonnets” hear Sonnet No. 189—­

    “Spirit.”

    “Throw me from this tall cliff,—­my wings are strong,
      The hurricane is raging fierce and high,
    My spirit pants, and all in heat I long
      To fly right upward to a purer sky,
      And spurn the clouds beneath me rolling by;
        Lo thus, into the buoyant air I leap
    Confident and exulting, at a bound
        Swifter than whirlwinds happily to sweep
    On fiery wing the reeling world around: 
      Off with my fetters!—­who shall hold me back? 
      My path lies there,—­the lightning’s sudden track
        O’er the blue concave of the fathomless deep,—­
      O that I thus could conquer space and time,
      Soaring above this world in strength sublime!”

CHAPTER XLVIII.

LUTHER.

I gave a second lecture, one on Luther, at the same place, and on the like solicitation of Mr. Le Fevre, President of the Balloon Society; the date being November 9, 1883.

Of this lecture, not to be tedious, I will here give only the peroration.

“And now, in conclusion, let us answer these reasonable questions:  What has Martin Luther done and suffered that we at this distant interval of four centuries should reverence his memory with gratitude and admiration?  What was the lifework he was raised up to do, and how did he do it? and what influence have his labours of old on the times in which we live?—­We must remember that in the sixteenth century priestcraft had culminated to its rankest height of fraud, cruelty, vice, and superstition:  the lay-folk everywhere were its serfs and victims, not to mention also numbers of