I, too, am a believer in the real and the useful; but to me, the sphere of both is almost infinite. Are not the feelings awakened on viewing a beautiful sunset, as real as your satisfaction after eating roast-beef? Though I acknowledge that no one can thoroughly enjoy the one, who feels the need of the other; if then weighed in the scale, the sunset would 'kick the beam.' All things 'by season seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection.' It would, for instance, be rather out of place to talk of the beauty of the stars to the houseless wanderer, for whom there were no 'cheerful lights of home;' to expatiate on the loveliness of the moon to him who must spend the chill night with no other covering than her 'silver mantle.'... Moonlight and memory are associated together in my mind--reflections of a set sun, wrapping in their calm, beautiful light, all things, even the graves of those we love.... I have thought that the murmur of the brook was the _voice of Silence_. Moonlight expresses to the eye--_silence_.... 'All this unreal?' I beg your pardon; I claim for my feelings the same reality that you claim for yours. Is only what is gross real? Is not the sky as real as the mountain that pierces it? Is there more reality in the chink of the dollar than in 'the music of the spheres'? This first is, I acknowledge, to me a pleasant sound, though only 'heard at rarest intervals.'... Yet I am rather inclined to believe in the reality of the music of the spheres; it is too ethereal, too spiritual a music for the ear to _sense_ it; the food and drink of the gods, ambrosia and nectar, even were we to swallow them, could our mortal palates taste them? Even thus may we drink in the music of the spheres, and, strange as it may seem, the more _ear_ we have, the less likely we will be to hear it. But--_not_ 'in this connection,' in no connection--the utilitarian also thoroughly despises cobweb theories, as he terms them. The world owes its greatest achievements to theories--cobwebs they may be. In caves have been found books of stone, whose nucleus was but cobweb; along these webs the calcareous solution ran, and hardened into stone. A cobweb theory has been the thread, on which, drop by drop, as it were, experiments have run and hardened into a possibility on which might be hung a _steam-boat_. There goes the night-train. Every morning as the engine with its train passes, the dark smoke rushing out of the chimney is touched by the rays of the rising sun and made glorious. I doubt not my enjoyment in looking at it is as real as that of the heaviest stockholder. Here I 'pitch my foot against'--as Paley says in his famous watch-argument--_a quotation_. 'Life is transfigured in the soft and tender Light of love, as a volume dense Of rolling smoke becomes a wreathed splendor In the setting sun.'