Nature is infinite, therefore its laws cannot be violated--_ergo_, there is no magic if we mean by that an inexplicable contravention of law.
But that there are minds who have simply advanced in knowledge beyond the multitude in certain things which cannot at once be made common property is true, for there is a great deal of marvelous truth not as yet dreamed of even by HERBERT SPENCERS or EDISONS, by RONTGENS or other scientists.

And yet herein is hidden the greatest secret of future human happenings.
"What I was is passed by, What I am away doth fly; What I shall be none do see, Yet in that my glories be." Now to illustrate this more clearly.

Some of these persons who are more or less secretly addicted to magic (I say secretly, because they cannot make it known if they would), take the direction of feeling or living with inexpressible enjoyment in the beauties of nature.

That, they attain to something almost or quite equal to life in Fairyland, is conclusively proved by the fact that only very rarely, here and there in their best passages, do the greatest poets more than imperfectly and briefly convey some broken idea or reflection of the feelings which are excited by thousands of subjects in nature in many.
The Mariana of TENNYSON surpasses anything known to me in any language as conveying the reality of feeling alone in a silent old house, where everything is a dim, uncanny manner, recalled the past--yet suggested a kind of mysterious presence--as in the passage: "All day within the dreary house The doors upon their hinges creaked, The blue fly sang in the pane, the mouse Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked, Or from the crevice peered about; Old faces glimmered thro' the doors, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices called her from without." Yet even this unsurpassed poem does no more than _partially_ revive and recall the reality to me of similar memories of long, long ago, when an invalid child I was often left in a house entirely alone, from which even the servants had absented themselves.

Then I can remember how after reading the Arabian Nights or some such unearthly romance, as was the mode in the Thirties, the very sunshine stealing craftily and silently like a living thing, in a bar through the shutter, twinkling with dust, as with infinitely small stars, living and dying like sparks, the buzzing of the flies who were little blue imps, with now and then a larger Beelzebub--a strange imagined voice ever about, which seemed to say something without words--and the very furniture, wherein the chairs were as goblins, and the broom a tall young woman, and the looking-glass a kind of other self-life--all of this as I recall it appears to me as a picture of the absence of human beings as described by TENNYSON, _plus_ a strange personality in every object-- which the poet does not attempt to convey.