was to be, forever after, the secret aspect and expression of his thought; his happiness was to be of that complexion; his failures, his sorrows, his tragedies were to wear at last something of that same face.
It reminded him of his Emerson, and he reached the volume from the row before him, unseeingly, his mind busy with his thoughts. He turned to a remembered passage in the essay on "Illusions." He read: "There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deception to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone."
The air had cleared! The cloud had lifted! The visionary had caught the first full sight of that vision which was to make the world less real to him thereafter than the matter of his thought. The idealist had fought his way, through the opposition of science and the realities, to the possession of the great ideal. The
