for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from
zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts
and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and
final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the
moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones. It offers hell and
heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice.
Our dodge is a choice. Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go
under in the tread-mill of Fate. Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far
damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of
fire. When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not
exaggerated. The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see,
beyond depth, again the sky and stars. Look through; for toward that
centre which is everywhere, we look. Hell was situated under the earth;
our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth. The widening
of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the
evil impulse alone does not extend. It is soon exhausted both in
attraction and effect,--is no power, but some suspense of life.

The first moral perception is always a shudder. Carlyle sees the lifted
judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but
Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife. Our poisons are medicines and
homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin.
The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is
glad tidings. Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It
opens only in the holiness of such men,--is a thunder out of clear sky,
before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and
cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal
Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the
furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted
by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of
gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is
not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.

The delight of contemplation has been in history a height without
sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube. Genius has been tremulous,
recluse,--has been cherished in solitude with Nature,--has been a
feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs
the refuse of mankind. It still coun