This alone belongs to and speaks intelligibly to all alike, the learned and the ignorant, if but the heart listens. For alike present in all, it may be awakened, but it can not be given. But let it not be supposed, that it is a sort of knowledge: no! it is a form of BEING, or indeed it is the only knowledge that truly is, and all other science is real only so far as it is symbolical of this. The material universe, saith a Greek philosopher, is but one vast complex mythus, that is, symbolical representation, and mythology the apex and complement of all genuine physiology. But as this principle can not be implanted by the discipline of logic, so neither can it be excited or evolved by the arts of rhetoric. For it is an immutable truth, that what comes from the heart, that alone goes to the heart; what proceeds from a divine impulse, that the godlike alone can awaken.

THE THIRD LANDING PLACE:

OR

ESSAYS MISCELLANEOUS.

Etiam a Musis si quando animum paulisper abducamus, apud Musas nihilominus feriamur; at reclines quidem, at otiosas, at de his et illis inter se libere colloquentes.

THE THIRD LANDING PLACE.

ESSAY I.

Fortuna plerumque est veluti galaxia quarundam obscurarum virtutum sine nomine.

BACON.

Fortune is for the most part but a galaxy or milky-way, as it were, of certain obscure virtues without a name.

DOES fortune favor fools?

Or how do you explain the origin of the proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the languages of Europe?

It may arise from pity, and

This proverb admits of various explanations according to the mood of mind in which it is used. the soothing persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless, and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb'-or the more sportive adage, that 'the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk.' The persuasion itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general love of the marvellous, may be accounted for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their visible cause and all circumstances that are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in procuring; inasmuch as it precludes the despondence, which might have kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over

which they had ridden the night before in perfect safety; or at tracing their footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact, that the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim those mysterious instincts of skill, which, though for the most part latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals.

Or the proverb may be used invidiously and folly in the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and fool-hardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of them; and in this sense fortune may be said to favor fools by those, who, however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valor and enterprise. Again an eminently good and wise man, for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself certain objects, and adapting the right means to the right end attains them but his objects not being what the world calls fortune, neither money nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to have been favored by fortune, and he slighted: although the fools did the same in their line as the wise man in his: they adapted the appropriate means to the desired end and so succeeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least, of both the words, fortune and fools.

But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to fortune, distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according to my favorite proverb, 'extremes meet,') the fool not seldom obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance, as the wise man by the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in human affairs from the infinite number of powers that are in action at the same time, and from the co-existence of things contingent and accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regular appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold ap