attained a high intellectual stage, though not the loftiest--were,
to contend with Nature, and wrest from her some secret, or some
power, which she had seen fit to withhold from mortal grasp. She
loves to delude her aspiring students, and mock them with mysteries
that seem but just beyond their utmost reach. To concoct new
minerals, to produce new forms of vegetable life, to create an
insect, if nothing higher in the living scale, is a sort of wish
that has often revelled in the breast of a man of science. An
astronomer, who lived far more among the distant worlds of space
than in this lower sphere, recorded a wish to behold the opposite
side of the moon, which, unless the system of the firmament be
reversed, she can never turn towards the earth. On the same page of
the volume was written the wish of a little child to have the stars
for playthings.

The most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome
recurrence, was, of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth, in sums from
a few shillings up to unreckonable thousands. But in reality this
often-repeated expression covered as many different desires. Wealth
is the golden essence of the outward world, embodying almost
everything that exists beyond the limits of the soul; and therefore
it is the natural yearning for the life in the midst of which we
find ourselves, and of which gold is the condition of enjoyment,
that men abridge into this general wish. Here and there, it is true,
the volume testified to some heart so perverted as to desire gold
for its own sake. Many wished for power; a strange desire indeed,
since it is but another form of slavery. Old people wished for the
delights of youth; a fop for a fashionable coat; an idle reader, for
a new novel; a versifier, for a rhyme to some stubborn word; a
painter, for Titian's secret of coloring; a prince, for a cottage; a