S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso E che ’l vero condito in molli versi, I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso. Tasso. People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the business of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of human progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are allowed to have much dignity. Your practical reasoners look for facts; facts “are the jockies for them”—such as they can see, hear, handle, or demonstrate; while the imaginations are mostly held synonymous with the worthless, the unsubstantial and the ridiculous. They seem to say in the spirit of one of Congreve’s characters—we forget which—“fiddle-faddle, don’t tell me of this and that and every thing in the world; but give me mathematical demonstration.” Now we do not go so far as the philosopher Bayle, who, on the other hand, affected to laugh at mathematical demonstration; but we think, “under leave of Brutus and the rest,” that facts do not seem, and have not seemed to be so exclusively essential to “the cosmogony of the world,” to the history and progress of mind and the general business of things, as some solid authorities think. Without troubling our heads, in this gossiping paper, with the subtleties of Berkley and others, who knock all creation into the compass of a man’s perceptions—establish the column of the unsubstantial universe on the pentagonal base of the senses—we have an idea that a vast amount of the fictitious and imaginary is blended with our regular business of being, doing and suffering. Human nature has, in all times, contrived a little gilding, to make the bitter pill of life go down. Tasso truly says—in his Invocation to the Virgin Mary for a muse—at the opening of his “Gerusalemme Liberata”— For well thou knowest, the world more fondly turns To old Parnassus’ consecrated spot; And truths which graceful poetry adorns Win while they please us; and a spell is wrought For the most subtle and reluctant thought. Thus, for the sickly child, by friendly wile, The cup’s deceptive edge, with sweetness fraught, Lures to the bitter potion—he the while Drinks life and health from the judicious guile. Not alone have the edges of the cup of life been touched in this way, but the contents of it have always been dashed with large doses of the same emollient. Reality is not such a delightful thing, after all. The false and the phantasmal have ever been considered the necessary complements, as it were, of our condition here.