rm of actual effort, and the
furtherance of Nature for the brave. Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, need
never exaggerate or leave the earth behind: in their experience it
carries well the sky. Every vital thought is some pleasure in running,
waking, loving, contending, helping,--is valor dealing gayly with the
homely old forces and needs. The marrow is sweet for him who can crack
it, in the roughest or the smoothest bone. One is born with a key to the
gladness of Nature, and glows with the day's work, the touch of hands,
the prospect of to-morrow,--love's production and husbandry, the old
worn grass and sunshine, the winter wind, the games and squabbles of
children and of men. Why is life for John weariness, for James every
moment fresh fire out of the sky? He who finds what he wants, or makes
what he wants, is a god. I know well the hope of saints and sages, how
they connect this life with endless stages beyond, how they look for the
same dignity in all action, the same motive in every companion; I see
what they have signified by heaven, a state wherein the best loved is
the best: but we must not be scornful, or miss to-day the common delight
of living, the moderate hopes of the healthy multitude. For no
exceptional joy is so wonderful as the universality of joy, the love of
life under every burden and stroke. The beginning of all beatitude and
ground of all is good digestion, good sleep, good-nature, and the cheer
undeniable of an average human day.

But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable
dimensions. Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is
earth and animalty seen from the sky. The bad neither so see nor fear.
Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and
the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope
and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our
future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of
destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour.
Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling
pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of
universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep. The
immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity:
man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to
the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is
no sky