The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862, page 149 by Various Authors
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>silence.... 'All this unreal?' I beg your pardon; I claim for my feelings the same reality that you claim for yours. Is only what is gross real? Is not the sky as real as the mountain that pierces it? Is there more reality in the chink of the dollar than in 'the music of the spheres'? This first is, I acknowledge, to me a pleasant sound, though only 'heard at rarest intervals.'... Yet I am rather inclined to believe in the reality of the music of the spheres; it is too ethereal, too spiritual a music for the ear to sense it; the food and drink of the gods, ambrosia and nectar, even were we to swallow them, could our mortal palates taste them? Even thus may we drink in the music of the spheres, and, strange as it may seem, the more ear we have, the less likely we will be to hear it.
But--not 'in this connection,' in no connection--the utilitarian also thoroughly despises cobweb theories, as he terms them. The world owes its greatest achievements to theories--cobwebs they may be. In caves have been found books of stone, whose nucleus was but cobweb; along these webs the calcareous solution ran, and hardened into stone. A cobweb theory has been the thread, on which, drop by drop, as it were, experiments have run and hardened into a possibility on which might be hung a steam-boat.
There goes the night-train. Every morning as the engine with its train passes, the dark smoke rushing out of the chimney is touched by the rays of the rising sun and made glorious. I doubt not my enjoyment in looking at it is as real as that of the heaviest stockholder. Here I 'pitch my foot against'--as Paley says in his famous watch-argument--a quotation.
'Life is transfigured in the soft and tender Light of love, as a volume dense Of rolling smoke becomes a wreathed splendor In the setting sun.'
But this warm subject of love I avoid as the whale avoids the warm water of the Gulf Stream. So I will wheel about--first, one more digression: This love, like the Gul