If
Hawthorne had but known of him! And yet how perfectly did his genius
divine that ideal element in our early New England life, conceiving what
must have been without asking proof of what actually was!
An extract or two will sufficiently exhibit Brewster in his lunes.
Sending back some alchemistic book to Winthrop, he tells him that if his
name be kept secret, "I will write as clear a light, as far as I dare to,
in finding the first ingredience.... The first figure in Flamonell doth
plainly resemble the first ingredience, what it is, & from whence it
comes, & how gotten, as there you may plainly see set forth by 2
resemblances held in a man's hand; for the confections there named is a
delusion, for they are but the operations of the work after some time
set, as the scum of the Red Sea, which is the Virgin's Milk upon the top
of the vessel, white. Red Sea is the sun & moon calcinated & brought &
reduced into water mineral which in some time, & most of the whole time,
is red. 2ndly, the fat of mercurial wind, that is the fat or quintessence
of sun & moon, earth & water, drawn out from them both, & flies aloft &
bore up by the operation of our mercury, that is our fire which is our
air or wind." This is as satisfactory as Lepidus's account of the
generation of the crocodile: "Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your
mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
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