bellows are essential to him who explores the elixir
of life. He who once quaffs that elixir, obtains
in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits
the force of his will to agencies dormant in Nature,
to giants unseen in the space. And here, as
he passes the boundary which divides his allotted
and normal mortality from the regions and races that
magic alone can explore, so, here, he breaks down the
safeguard between himself and the tribes that are hostile.
Is it not ever thus between man and man? Let
a race the most gentle and timid and civilized dwell
on one side a river or mountain, and another have
home in the region beyond, each, if it pass not the
intervening barrier, may with each live in peace.
But if ambitious adventurers scale the mountain,
or cross the river, with design to subdue and enslave
the population they boldly invade, then all the invaded
arise in wrath and defiance—the neighbors
are changed into foes. And therefore this process—by
which a simple though rare material of Nature is made
to yield to a mortal the boon of a life which brings,
with its glorious resistance to Time, desires and
faculties to subject to its service beings that dwell
in the earth and the air and the deep—has
ever been one of the same peril which an invader must
brave when he crosses the bounds of his nation.
By this key alone you unlock all the cells of the
alchemist’s lore; by this alone understand how
a labor, which a chemist’s crudest apprentice
could perform, has baffled the giant fathers of all
your dwarfed children of science. Nature, that
stores this priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding
it to man—the invisible tribes that abhor
him oppose themselves to the gain that might give
them a master. The duller of those who were the
life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance,
trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at
the very point of fruition; some doltish mistake,
some improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur,
a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the
bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel,
by falling asleep by the furnace. The invisible
foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves visible where
they can frustrate the bungler as they mock at his
toils from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers,
equally foiled in despite of their patience and skill,
would have said, ’Not with us rests the fault;
we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight.
But out from the caldron dread faces arose, and the
specters or demons dismayed and baffled us.’
Such, then, is the danger which seems so appalling
to a son of the East, as it seemed to a seer in the
dark age of Europe. But we can deride all its
threats, you and I. For myself, I own frankly I take
all the safety that the charms and resources of magic
bestow. You, for your safety, have the cultured
and disciplined reason which reduces all fantasies
to nervous impressions; and I rely on the courage of
one who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow,
and wrested from the hand of the magician himself
the wand which concentered the wonders of will!”