The Unseen World, and Other Essays

The Unseen World, and Other Essays is by John Fiske. The book includes what its author calls a scanty essay on the Unseen World, together with a dozen papers appended by way of clearing out the author's workshop. The book is dedicated to James Sime, and the author recalls midnight talks in Great Russell Street and the Addison Road.

The text looks ahead to the remote future, when our sun is reduced to vapour by the impact of the several planets upon his surface. One essay says characters unduly exalted or defamed by party spirit are daily being set before us in their true, or at least in a truer, light, and that Humpbacked Richard turns out to have been one of the handsomest kings that ever sat on the throne of England. Another essay says an enormous quantity of activity causes American life to assume the aspect of a life-and-death struggle for mastery over the material forces of that part of the earth's surface upon which it thrives.