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does not envy those who have seen safely to an en their manful endeavour? Who that sees the mear ness of our politics but inly congratulates Washingto that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, an for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, th hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Wh does not sometimes envy the good and brave, wh are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natura world, and await with curious complacency the speed term of his own conversation with finite nature And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner tha treacherous has already made death impossible, an affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps absolute and inextinguishable being.

THE OVER-SOUL

"But souls that of his own good life partake, He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: He'll never them forsake:

When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”

Henry More.

Space is ample, east and west,

But two cannot go abreast,

Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo

Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day 've been tampered with,
Every quality and pith

Surcharged and sultry with a power

That works its will on age and hour.

ESSAY IX.

THE OVER-SOUL

THERE is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and

magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man

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