If such thoughts came to me, as to any one they might, must they not have come often and often to those of whom I have been telling? and must not these men have been seized at times with a wistful sense of the humor of their situation? If so, what gave them courage to keep on and to endure until the end? Was it that by some fatality they were bond-slaves to the remote, from whose dominance they could not, even if they would, have freed themselves? For one may suppose that all men, even philosophers, are human enough sometimes to crave the response of their fellows to the effort of their lives; the recognition not merely of some few initiated ones, but of the many or of those who represent the many by the simplicity of their thought. Must not many a one whose labor was with the stars have stopped on his way to envy some singer at the street-corner whose trivial melody had caught the ear and held the steps of passers-by? What reasoning then, or what destiny carried our star-gazer on to his lonely vigil? You may say, the psychology of the man who thinks of cosmic things is simple and that his steadfastness is due to his inability to realize or his ability to forget the homely intimate things of life that to the rest of us are, if not important, yet all the more indispensable. To this I answer: ’tis unlikely! But whether true or not of any of those whose thoughts must seem (if I have not entirely failed to render them) so much our own, let it not be true of us! I mean, that no one can think of himself as likely to enrich the world so greatly by his thought and labor that he may count himself to be or encourage himself to become a soul solitary to its toil. Which, being so of our lives as a whole, we frequently feel and wholesomely feel that it is not very well for us to indulge even moments of these lives in studies and reflections so detached from all the give and take of our other time as to leave no trace of influence there. Perhaps indeed it cannot be said of any of our momentary flights away from familiar things that we come back from them with no star-dust on our wings, and so these spirit holidays may be excused as may any other holiday on the ground of their quickening and refreshment. But little as I would quarrel with holidays of any kind, and satisfied as I should be had any one found these pages opening to him a door to some fourth dimension where momentary exhilaration or passing forgetfulness might be found, yet I have the feeling that holidays are but a poor imperfect device for making other days more livable.