soul, and by love I conquer and
incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that
mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up
at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature
whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting
its whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as
the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no
longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion
to the vigor of the individual these revolutions are frequent, until in
some happier mind they are incessant and all worldly relations hang
very loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent fluid membrane
through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men,
an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and of no settled
character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be
enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of
yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a
putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment
day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing,
resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes
by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters
of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper
eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in
to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the
ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs,
nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We
cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit
and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, 'Up and onward for
evermore!' We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the
new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who
look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at
the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the
deep remedial force that underlies all fa