For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

But though I want to see a vision as much as anybody, I am out of touch
with the company of the credulous. I am with Doubting Thomas. I have no
capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark
rooms and magic. People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but
cold. I know a man--a most excellent man--whose life is a perfect debauch
of visions and revelations. He seems to discover the philosopher's stone
every other day. Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation.
If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live
until everybody is tired of you. Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of
bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption. For one period he
could talk of nothing but dried milk; for another, acetic acid was the
thing. Rub yourself with acetic acid and you would be as invulnerable to
the ills of the body as Achilles was after he had been dipped by Thetis in
the waters of Styx. The stars tell him anything he wishes to believe, and
he can conjure up spirits as easily as another man can order a cab. It is
not that he is a fool. In practical affairs he is astonishingly astute. It
is that he has an illimitable capacity for belief. He is always on the road
to Damascus.

For my part I am content to wait. I am for Wordsworth's creed of "wise
passiveness." I should as soon think of reading my destiny on the sole of
my boot as in the palm of my hand. The one would be just as illuminating as
the other. It would tell me what I chose to make it tell me. That and no
more. And so with the stars. People who pretend to read the riddle of our
affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying