And yet the world is but a vast army of bubble chasers, with here and there a sage smiling at, or rebuking, the folly. Each has his fatuity—each his blind passion, his bubble of the imagination. Fortune, Fame, Pleasure, how many do they beckon away from comfort, peace and happiness? Amid the press upon each crowded avenue, how few are allowed to turn back! How many fall and are trodden down forever! and yet the sanguine multitude, rushing over the bodies of the slain, heed not the fall of their companions, but press on as eagerly as before after vanishing shadows. Why is it, that when happiness itself is basking at our feet, imploring acceptance, that with a blind fatuity we rush at any cost on misery? Is it because the mind is ever, in this world, after the unattainable, that we see fortune, fame, domestic comfort, personal ease, all shipwrecked, on all sides of us in life, to attain the undesirable? That the merchant with his bank-roll of tens of thousands, squanders all in one wild effort to grasp a bubble upon an unknown sea. That the man of letters, to whom God has given an intellect but a little lower than that of angels, and who might model and mould the mind of a nation to good, and shine as a star in the intellectual firmament, to be worshiped in all time by the students of genius, “who follow her flashing torch along every path to knowledge”—knowing his high gifts for good, and feeling their power, scorns the possession, and scatters the bale-fires of a mighty intellect, as a volcano showers down lava and ashes, upon mankind—blighting, as with a destroying angel’s touch, the fair world in which he lives.
That the domestic hearth, with children merry-voiced, over which meek-eyed Peace hovered like a dove, and around which Heaven’s own smile seemed to linger, is treacherously invaded by the demon of jealousy, green-eyed and furious, until Crime, with swarthy countenance and bloody locks, broods with Death’s Angel over the silent spot.
The Perils of the Imagination, how they invest the unsatisfied! Are these the penalties which God imposes for unthankfulness? or is it that the devil, ever working at the heart, urges man to ingratitude, and excites him to folly? What think you, Jeremy?