Only, [169] don't be angry with me, because, as a friend, I would not suffer you to pass your life in a dream, pleasant perhaps, but still only a dream--because I wake you up and demand that you should busy yourself with the proper business of life, and send you to it possessed of common sense.

What your soul was full of just now is not very different from those Gorgons and Chimaeras and the like, which the poets and the painters construct for us, fancy-free:--things which never were, and never will be, though many believe in them, and all like to see and hear of them, just because they are so strange and odd.
And you too, methinks, having heard from some such maker of marvels of a certain woman of a fairness beyond nature--beyond the Graces, beyond Venus Urania herself--asked not if he spoke truth, and whether this woman be really alive in the world, but straightway fell in love with her; as they say that Medea was enamoured of Jason in a dream.

And what more than anything else seduced you, and others like you, into that passion, for a vain idol of the fancy, is, that he who told you about that fair woman, from the very moment when you first believed that what he said was true, brought forward all the rest in consequent order.
Upon her alone your eyes were fixed; by her he led you along, when once you had given him a hold upon you--led you along the straight road, as he said, to the beloved one.

All was easy after that.

[170] None of you asked again whether it was the true way; following one after another, like sheep led by the green bough in the hand of the shepherd.
He moved you hither and thither with his finger, as easily as water spilt on a table! My friend! Be not so lengthy in preparing the banquet, lest you die of hunger! I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful and necessary; but it remained water only, none the less." Just there the conversation broke off suddenly, and the disputants parted.