2. To suggest to readers a more satisfactory way of considering what they read than that usually received. 3. To point to certain phases of the human appearance reflected in the mirror which are not generally noticed, but which I find interesting and suggestive. You would think it very unreasonable, would you not, for any one to insist that because your highly polished glass backed by quicksilver, gives back so clear and excellent an image, _therefore_ the watery vision you catch of yourself in the shifting, glancing ripples of a clear stream is not an image at all! With all the curious elongating and drifting and shortening back and breaking up into wavering circles, done by that unresting image, you know very certainly that is you; and if you look into the still waters of some summer pool, or mountain rain-cup, the image there is almost as sharp-lined as that in your polished glass, except for the vague tremor that seems to move under the water rather than on its surface, and suggest an ethereal something missing in your drawing-room shadow. Yet that vision conjured in the water-depth is you--surely you. Nay, even more,--that _first_ image of you, you perceived when as a child you danced in the firelight and saw a misshapen darkness rising and falling along the wall in teasing mockery,--that too was surely an image of you--an image of interception, not of reflection; a blur, a vacancy, a horror, from which you fled shrieking to your mother's arms;--and yet it was the distorted outline of you. You grew familiar with it later, amused yourself with it, twisted your hands into strange positions to see what curious shapes they would form upon the wall, and made whole stories with the shadows. Long afterward you went back to them with deliberate and careful curiosity, to see how the figures stumbled on by accident could be definitely produced, at will, according to the laws of interception. Even so the first _Man-Images_, cast back from the blank wall of Language, are uncouth, ungraspable, vague, vacant, menacing--to the men who saw them, frightful. Mankind produced this paradox: the early _lights_ of literature were _darkness_!