To old Parnassus’ consecrated spot;
And truths which graceful poetry adorns
Win while they please us; and a spell is wrought
For the most subtle and reluctant thought.
Thus, for the sickly child, by friendly wile,
The cup’s deceptive edge, with sweetness fraught,
Lures to the bitter potion—he the while
Drinks life and health from the judicious guile.
Not alone have the edges of the cup of life been touched in this way, but the contents of it have always been dashed with large doses of the same emollient. Reality is not such a delightful thing, after all. The false and the phantasmal have ever been considered the necessary complements, as it were, of our condition here.
If we take away from the amount of what the world possesses that which belongs and is due to the imagination merely—what is not authentic, and could not be sworn to in a court of justice—what will be left? Let us take it away—and what then? There is a sudden solitude in the world. The beautiful is vanished, and the hard, blank remnant of things is full of gaps, and desert places, disastrous flaws and a strange silence. There is nothing now, but facts in this macrocosm. But, believe us, ’tis a very rude, cold place to live in—much worse than ever it was before; and that—in the opinion of the pale pessimist over the way there—was bad enough in all conscience. They who first found out this world, and roamed about on it, had scarcely called it very good when they began to make it better, by peopling its too extensive solitudes—creating phantasms and imaginations for it, where there were none before. The unclothed reality of things was too bare and blank, beautiful as it was, for the first human beings that walked the earth. They looked to the elements, and the infinite host of heaven, and following their unanswerable instincts, they began to make mysteries, airy fabrics and visions. They imagined a god for the cope and the clouds of the firmament, and he wielded the thunderbolts from a high mountain; another, shaped after the most perfectly formed of men, resided in the sun,