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!”