h and confirm their daily life of routine and
habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly
than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are
wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book,
that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his
native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity
in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him,
revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was
removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the
Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed,
mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some
holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." I perceive that
we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our
vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is
which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only
the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should
give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not
recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a
court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what
that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces
in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of
the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last
man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all
these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself
culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the
lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is
sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of
the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently
answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is
laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or
the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his
posterity at least could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the