Choose beauty and wonder

We do not, to be sure, make our choice whether we shall be literalist or dreamer;

. . . enthusiast, or keyed in a lower pitch of the marvelous scale of human temperament.

But were that election within our power, who would choose to things quite as they are, or as they are currently said to be? 

 Who would not invite the good genius that could relieve us from the ennui of commonplace and every-day by touching these with such enchantment that we should seem to ourselves " surrounded by beauty and wonder " ?

  Is it of more service to see dust-motes in a sunbeam as dust-motes merely,

or to see in those shifting atoms what the youthful poet in the lecture-room beheld -- ambassadors to spirit his fancy away to Onberon and fairyland?

           - The Century, Illustrated Monthly Magazine (November 1895)