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It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged.
One of the most serious duties attending a residence in India is the correcting of those misapprehensions which your travelling M.P. sacrifices his bath to hustle upon paper. The spectacled people embalmed in secretariats alone among Anglo-Indians continue to see the gay visions of griffinhood. They alone preserve the phantasmagoria of bookland and dreamland. As for the rest of us:
As our travellers watched the progress of the flames, and every now and then observed a terrified antelope spring from its lair, and appearing like a black figure in a phantasmagoria, suddenly the storm burst upon them and the rain poured down in torrents, accompanied with large hail-stones and thunder and lightning.
In a combination from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money.
This thought that a caring relationship grounded in many years could dissipate with such precipitancy by a mutual friend jumping off a balcony was proof of the vaporous quality of all things. It tortured him in one deranged second for all was a phantasm of the mind and the phantasmagoria of an impermanent existence.
It was a scene without parallel in the history of the world this phantasmagoria of grubs and butterflies, met together for auld lang syne in their beloved hatching-place.
Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.
I felt myself uplifted by some divine power that steeped me in infinite joy, in a sweet and languid rapture. I would have given my life, I think, to have prolonged these phantasmagoria for a little, but suddenly a shrill voice clamored in my ears: "Awake and follow me!" A withered woman took my hand in hers; its icy coldness crept through every nerve.
The jewellers cut a fair show, and the drapers, too, But the grocer took, or rather would have taken, the cake if the "Law" allowed it to be baked. There were no jellies, no tempting hams, no imported puddings nor nude poultry, none of the solid, savoury things associated with the festive season. There were none of these; but holly, mistletoe, and Chinese lanterns made a fine phantasmagoria.
The voices which chanted these melodies were discordant, but the people around listened with reverential awe, from time to time making excited comments in Irish. Altogether Tuam is a depressing kind of place, and but for the enterprise of a few Protestants, the place would be a phantasmagoria of pigs, priests, peasants, poverty, and "peelers."
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