many persons, who have not investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in “Darkest Africa.” Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion—
Outlet and invitation and opportunity—
San Salvadors of the Sky—a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of Servia—a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives, which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to fringe with uniform, decorous icicles—from which there will be no escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts, departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible requital of needs are opposed—not by the orthodoxy of the common Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space—see Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that—accounts from the Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.—Nature, etc.—except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and the oceans of an extra-geography—
Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well cooked and well served, comfort looked after so carefully—or some day board the thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences.
