the world! So it would be with the undiscovered country. I was blamed
the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if 'one
traveller returned,' his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as
the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as
to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades. Yet it is a
perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the
modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for
reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus
of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as
Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be
advertising 'Bank-holidays in Eternity'?

No! let us keep the Unseen--or, if it must be discovered, let the key
thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.




A SEAPORT IN THE MOON


No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I
trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He
knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the
fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is
but one opinion upon the moon--namely, our own. And if you think that
science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of
things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and
stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human
life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon