Good Sense. I wonder you can take any interest in such observations or experiments.  Don’t you see how almost impossible it is to make them with any exactness, how entirely impossible to know anything about them unless made by yourself, when the least leaven of credulity, excited fancy, to say nothing of willing or careless imposture, spoils the whole loaf?  Beside, allowing the possibility of some clear glimpses into a higher state of being, what do we want of it now?  All around us lies what we neither understand nor use.  Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere, are but half developed.  Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural, before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.  I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree, and let the wind blow on me.  There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

Free Hope. And for me also.  Nothing is truer than the Wordsworthian creed, on which Carlyle lays such stress, that we need only look on the miracle of every day, to sate ourselves with thought and admiration every day.  But how are our faculties sharpened to do it?  Precisely by apprehending the infinite results of every day.

Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field?  The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground?  No,—­but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground.  Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking!

The mind, roused powerfully by this existence, stretches of itself into what the French sage calls the “aromal state.”  From the hope thus gleaned it forms the hypothesis, under whose banner it collects its facts.

Long before these slight attempts were made to establish, as a science what is at present called animal magnetism, always, in fact, men were occupied more or less with this vital principle,—­principle of flux and influx,—­dynamic of our mental mechanics,—­human phase of electricity.  Poetic observation was pure, there was no quackery in its free course, as there is so often in this wilful tampering with the hidden springs of life, for it is tampering unless done in a patient spirit and with severe truth; yet it may be, by the rude or greedy miners, some good ore is unearthed.  And some there are who work in the true temper, patient and accurate in trial, not rushing to conclusions, feeling there is a mystery, not eager to call it by name till they can know it as a reality:  such may learn, such may teach.