a thought is the love of the
universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation
with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The
least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from
the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of
poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume
of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and instantly
we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought
reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself present through all
ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when
first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my
thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul's scale is
one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. Before
the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In
common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the
immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the
Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day
of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the
like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we
contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and
connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one,
detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The
wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any
whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul
looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds
behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties
nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing
robe in which she is clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to
be computed. The soul's advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of
state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,--from the egg to the
worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain
total character, that does not advance the elect individual first over
John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered
inferiority,-