There is a diviner alchemy wanted, and there is room for a bolder and a more patient spirit of investigation, amid the drudgery and bustle of common life, than was ever yet employed, or ever needed, in ransacking the earth for gems and gold, or the deep sea for pearls. Would you shovel diamonds and rubies, or turn up "as it were fire," you have but to dig into and sift the rubbish that lies heaped up in your very streets—or to drive the ploughshare through the busiest places ever trodden by the multitude. You need not blast the mountains, nor turn up the foundations of the sea, nor smelt the constellations. You have but to open your eyes, and to look about you with a thankful heart; and you will find no such thing as worthless ore—no baseness unallied with something precious; with hidden virtue, or with unchangeable splendor.
The golden air you breathe toward evening, after a bright, rattling summer-shower—the golden motes you may see playing in the sunshine with clouds of common dust, if you but take the trouble to lift your eyes, when you are lying half asleep in your easy-chair, just after dinner—are part and parcel of the atmosphere and the earth; and yet have they fellowship with the stars, and with the light that trembleth forever upon the wing of the cherubim. Be ye of the towering and the steadfast upon earth, and these will be to you in the darkness of midnight as revelations from the sky; as unforetold glimpses of the Imperishable and the Pure that inhabit the Empyrean.
But, being one of those who go about the world for three score years and ten, with their night-caps pulled over their eyes—and ears—you don't believe a word of this. And when you are told with all seriousness that there is room for more wonderful and comforting transmutations, of the baser earth just under your window, or just round the corner, than was ever dreamed of by the wisest of those who have grown old among furnaces and crucibles and retorts; wearing their lives away in a search after perpetual youth, and their substance in that which sooner and more surely than "riotous living" impoverisheth a man—the transmutation of the baser metals into gold—you fall a whistling maybe—or beg leave to suggest the word fudge. If so, take my word for it, like a pretty woman with the small-pox, the probability is, you are very much to be pitted.
All stuff and nonsense! you say—downright rigmarole—can't for the life of you understand what the fellow's driving at.
Indeed.
As sure as you are sitting there.
Well, then, we must try to convince you. One of the pleasantest things for a man who does believe in night-caps, you will grant me, though, at the best, he may be nothing more than a bachelor, is to lie out in the open air, on a smooth sloping hill-side, when the earth is fragrant, and the wind south, on a long drowsy summer afternoon—with his great-coat under him if the earth is damp—and with the long rich grass bending over him, and the blossoming clover swinging between him and a clear blue sky, starred all over with golden dandelions, buttercups and white-weed—
Faugh!
One moment if you please—with golden dandelions, buttercups and white-weed—
Poh!—pish!—Why don't you say with the dent-de-lion, the ranunculus and the crysanthimum?